Thank you, Semo Electric!
Yes! I came back from my sister-in-law's house in Cape today to find that MY POWER WAS BACK ON!! Yippee! If I could do cartwheels, I would!
According to my son Matthew, the surest way to lure the power back is to buy a generator, start hooking it up, and voila - the electricity is miraculously restored! Fortunately for me, all I had to do was make the trip to Cape and buy four propane lantern tanks!
After I got home and unloaded the propane tanks, paper plates, forks, spoons, and cups (all my dishes were dirty!), I stood in the newly-warm house and thought, "What do I do now??" No more building up the fire, putting a cup of water on the fender for tea, cooking my soup in the fireplace, getting everything done before dark, so I could sit and crochet or read, while my radio played and the propane lantern hissed on the desk behind me...
For a week, I've been honing my tough new lifestyle skills, camping out in the living room, shutting off the rest of the house, living small. Now I have to retrench.
I admit to feeling a little bit of a let down. All my energies have been focused on survival, and now I'm back to the good life. I turn on the faucet, and water comes out. That's so easy! I'm a victim of culture shock!! How can I adjust?
No more lugging the empty kitty litter jugs to Emma's house to fill them up.
No more carrying the flashlight into a cold kitchen, fixing some soup in plenty of time for it to get warm on the fireplace fender.
No more sleeping on the couch under two afghans and two cats, getting up 3-5 times a night to put more wood on the fire.
No more having to go to someone else's house to take a shower.
How will I ever adjust??
From the cold hills of Tillman, Missouri, this is your grateful rural reporter, vowing that I WILL buy a generator before this happens again!!!!!!!!
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It makes you realize what's really important in life. When I look back to how my mind was working (or not working) before the ice storm, I can see the shallowness. I feel as if the inside of my head has been rearranged into new configurations.
I'm so appreciative of the help I had, too. If I had been willing to go off and leave my animals, I could have stayed somewhere different every night; I had so many offers. Even my animal-rescue friend Marilyn invited me to stay in their remote home in the Zalma hills. I stayed 7 days out here without power and 2 at my sister-in-law's in Cape.
Now that I can get the news, I see how much worse it was south of here. And, there are some horror stories from elsewhere. Marilyn told me that an Oran farmer may lose his entire herd of cattle -- the barn collapsed on them and killed three, badly cutting up several more. The rest of the herd was afraid to come in the barn after that, so they stood out in that freezing rain and caught pneumonia.
I was SOOOOOOOO glad I didn't have goats this time!