Thank Heaven for electricity

This week I realized just how much I love electricity! On Thursday we had a huge storm here in the Chicago area and our power went out about 3:30 that day. After about an hour of sitting in the dark and having no clue what was really going on, other than occasionally calling Matthew and having him give me updates from the news (there was a tornado warning), I finally called my friend Sandi and ended up going to hang out with her until my power went back on. Well, we ate dinner there and TJ and I ended up sleeping there that night. Matthew came home since he had to leave early for work, and he was woken up about 1:00 a.m. by bright white flames shooting about 3 feet high from a power line in our parking lot. He called the fire department and they came over, but there wasn't much they could do and just had to wait for ComEd to come and take care of it. TJ and I came home the next morning about 9:00 and still had no power, so I was showering by flashlight, which actually worked quite well, and TJ was trying to stay entertained with no lights or power of any sort. We ran some errands, enjoyed a piece of pizza together at Costco and then came home for nap time. After TJ's nap, we ran over to the grocery store to get some ice but they were also closed due to the power outage, and the gas station across the street was out of ice, so after Matthew got home from work that evening we packed up a cooler with our food from the freezer (pretty much everything from the fridge had to be tossed) and headed out to his parent's. They were in North Carolina at the time, but we were able to store our stuff in their freezer until our power came back on, which was Saturday. I was also helping throw a baby shower on Saturday and needed to bake a cake and print a few things off the computer, both of which were impossible at my house with no electricity. There are still some families in our ward who don't have power yet, and on top of that, there has been a bunch of flooding in this area as well. Quite often we long to have a basement but at times like this it's not so bad living on the third floor and having no worries of flooding. :-) We're grateful the only thing we really had to worry about was replacing food in our fridge instead carpet, furniture, etc.