Weather: Cold, but sunny and clear.Music: Nothing at the moment.Mood: Pretty good.What I'm doing right now: Decluttering the house and taking down some of my Christmas stuff.We almost had a white Christmas this year--there was a prediction of snow on Christmas Day but we didn't get any until the next day. This is what my yard looked like last Wednesday morning:
The snow stopped by early afternoon, and by 4:00 it had warmed up enough that almost all of it had melted and dried up.Christmas week was a little busier than usual . . . I got to spend a lot of time visiting with friends, catching up on movies, and eating a lot more than I should have. It was a lot of fun, but I'm kind of glad it's all over now so I can spend a few days at home catching up on other stuff.I spent Christmas afternoon at my brother Tom's house, enjoying a truly wonderful turkey dinner (did I mention that he and Charlotte are really good cooks?), visiting with the two of them and watching my niece Emelia enjoying her presents, which included a fairy dress, a new chair, and a really cool electric car (which she was a little wary of at first because of one the sound effects):
I've got some other ones, but it'll be a few days (probably longer) before I can get them resized and posted.
For anyone who hasn't been keeping up with the news, Oklahoma is currently recovering from the most severe ice storm and most extensive power outage in the history of the state. At one point over 600,000 homes and businesses had lost power and the estimated time for getting that power back was 7 to 10 days.. However, much of the power has been restored now, thanks to the round-the-clock efforts of the local repair crews and the 1000 extra repairmen who came here from six other states to help out. Other clean-up crews have been busy taking care of all of the downed tree limbs and toppled trees all over the city (and other parts of the state as well).The storm started sometime very early Sunday morning and continued until late Sunday night/early Monday morning. I stayed inside and stayed warm, listening to tree limbs cracking and crashing to the ground all over my neighborhood and wondering when one of them was going to hit a power line.
Just after noon on Monday, my brother Tom called to let me know that his power had gone out, and he and my sister-in-law and niece came over later in the day to spend a few days (or so they thought) at my place. However, my power went out around 4:00 Tuesday morning, so we decided to head back to his house and try to use his gas stove to stay warm (which we did and it worked out pretty well). Later in the day a friend of his who still had power brought over his generator, so we were able to use a space heater instead of the stove and enjoyed some light and TV news as well. We camped out in the living room to be close to the heater and spent much of our time entertaining my niece (who was enjoying the extra company and attention), and we managed to have a good time in spite of everything.Their power came back on Wednesday night, and mine was back on when I came back to check on things Thursday morning, so things are slowly returning to normal. I have a few downed tree limbs in my front yard, but that's the worst thing I still have to deal with as far as I can tell.I've posted some post-storm pictures in my Photobucket account (just use the link in the sidebar on the right and look for my "Ice Storm 2007" album). All of the pictures except for the last one were taken on 12/10 at various times of the day. The last one was taken on 12/13 (just after I got home from Tom's house) and shows some of the tree damage in my neighbor's front yard (she has four trees and all of them lost most of their limbs).
Weather: Nice but steadily getting colder.Music: Nothing at the moment.Mood: Somewhere between "okay" and "bleah." I came down with a cold the Thursday before Halloween after waking up with a sore throat for several days. This one has been pretty mild as colds go, but the symptoms have been hanging on for dear life . . . I'm still dealing with some coughing and congestion (although neither is particularly bad) and I'm still tired most of the time because I haven't been sleeping well. Other than that, I'm feeling pretty good.What I've been doing lately: Aside from the usual, trying to catch up on my reading (I just finished Listening Woman by Tony Hillerman and I'm trying to finish The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman before the movie comes out in December) and trying to finish a review of a one-day horror convention I went to back in October so I can post it here (and there's no good excuse for not having it done and posted already and I'm going to try really, really hard to start working on it again this week so I can finish it and get it posted sometime before the end of the year).
