Yesterday Tucker and I escaped from the snow to visit my mom near Orlando. I love Virginia. I love our home. But this time I was very ready to leave.
When we left Virginia we were still out of power and had been for more than 36 hours, and the whole town was still entirely shut down. (Incidentally, it's a bit funny to fly after several days without being able to shower... at least I didn't know anyone around me.)
We didn't get the epic storm predicted because the temperature was a couple degrees too warm and we got freezing ran for half of the storm rather than straight snow. Still, 15-20 inches of snow plus 12 or more hours of freezing rain. That's A LOT of precipitation. It's also a lot of trees falling down on powerlines. Thankfully, when we checked in with Austin last night he finally got power back in the middle of our conversation. Phew.
We do really well without power, between our wood stoves and some foresight to fill up the bathtub with water and fill up lots of jugs of water (our well doesn't work when the power's out). When it's cold out, we just put our perishables on the porch. (When we were emptying our fridge this time, Tucker found a bottle of lemon juice and drank the whole entire thing... he loves lemons and all things sour.)
Still, the temperature was between 5 and 10 degrees two nights in a row and we woke up to our kitchen being a frigid 52 degrees. The biggest problem was no nightlight for Tucker. He has this light-up turtle that makes colored stars on the ceiling of a dark room. Unfortunately, it goes out after 20 minutes so when he would wake up, it would be dark and he'd start to cry. It gets old turning on Turtle every couple hours all night long. The second night we kept a head lamp on for him all night, and our nights' sleep were much improved.
As I sit here and type I'm watching three gigantic turtles sun themselves on the bank of a little lake/pond in back of my mom's house. We've been treated to up-close views of pelicans and great blue herons and have gotten to play in the sand. Tucker has much more interest in the ocean than he had last summer, and is very much a fan of GoGo's pink house.
