An uninvited guest departs

Don’t you just hate uninvited guests who just breeze into town, create havoc, and then leave you standing there, wondering what in the world just happened??

Last Saturday was a whirlwind of a day, preparing for the arrival of Irene.  I mean USUALLY when we have a guest over at Morning Star Meadows it involves buying a few extra groceries, getting some laundry done, making up the guest room and then doing a bit of cleaning up inside.  

We’re usually all excited for the arrival of a guest to our farm!

 But Irene was SO demanding!  We had to clean the ENTIRE yard!  

We had to buy groceries for 3 or 4 days!  

We had to gas up the vehicles to the brim and get out extra cash at the ATM machine!  

We had to fill up jars, pitchers and pans with clean drinking water and buckets, pails and bathtubs with water to flush the toilets because she promised to do anything she could to cut our electricity!  

All this because Irene was coming!  And what did SHE bring?  Destruction, flooding, high winds!  She did NOTHING to help out here!  We even had to hide the sheep and hens from her because she promised to be so belligerent!

So, there we sat last Saturday night waiting for her arrival.  Of course she’s one of those important people who thought she didn’t have to give you an exact arrival time.  She just came when she was good and ready and took her good old time.  Of course it was JUST after I had started putting together a blog entry that night that she knocked out our power JUST long enough to throw our modem off and cut us off from the internet!

Our eldest son, a new North Stonington Volunteer Firefighter, sat waiting at the station for the first call.  Being a newbie to the company, he was the only one excited about Irene’s visit. That is, until the 65th call the following day for a downed tree or wire!  THEN even HE was no longer enjoying Irene’s company!

 

So, internet now dead and power wavering, we headed off to bed last Saturday night, cautiously optimistic that Irene might actually behave herself the next day.  These things are all a bunch of media hype, right?!

 

Of course when we awoke Sunday morning to no power, we knew that we were wrong!

 

No power meant…

 

No internet

No telephone, except this lifesaver of mine

And this device, with which I have a love/hate relationship (yes, we could sometimes access the internet and make calls when the cell tower was cooperating, but all of those tiny letters made my head spin and my thumbs tired!)

No dishwasher

No running water, microwave, refrigerator (though we were blessed to have a generator to keep our 2nd fridge and deep freezer going)

 

For nearly 5 days we embraced a new way of life.

 

Our light sources…

Our coffee…water boiled on the stove and then poured, slowly, through the coffee maker…

Our dishwashing

Our cooking device (plus we had the gas cooktop, lit now by matches instead of an electrically induced spark) … 

We also were happy that we had perfected our “sun tea” through the summer, so nothing really changed there, except for the lack of practically unlimited ice cubes to chill it in our glass!

 

Our entertainment…

One of our better lit classroom situations…

Our disinfection method…

We pumped water for the toilets…we borrowed water for drinking from our dear neighbors with a mega-generator for their whole house…

we hauled buckets of water down to the sheep and hens, and buckets back up from the well for the toilets.  The water supplies in our tubs and laundry sink were quickly exhausted.

We blasted through everything we could in the fridge.  We were getting very creative in our meal-making!  We were, in particular, trying to use up the milk since the generator wasn’t running continuously, and we feared the milk would sour since the fridge wasn’t always kept as cold as it should be.  We made a lot of yogurt…and ate a lot of yogurt!

It was certainly an experience we won’t soon forget!

 

So now we are pretty much back to normal.  Damage was, thankfully, minimal.  The shed for the sheep was blown and spun around, landing 50 feet across the paddock, damaging the fence.  We went out in the wind and rain on Sunday afternoon to repair it.  The sheep had thankfully been tucked safely in the barn late Saturday, and they happily emerged Sunday afternoon, loving the wind blowing through their wooly coats.  

 

Knowing what our dairy farmer friends had to endure – with loss of corn crop, fuel costs for generators, etc., we were truly blessed in how little we had to suffer.  

 

This tragedy brought out the best in so many people, including a practicer of random acts of kindness who decided to pay for our entire meal out at a restuarant on Wednesday night!

 

And our wonderful neighbors…I will never forgeth her visit one afternoon…”Would you like to come over with the girls tonight for showers?  And then maybe tomorrow the boys can come over?”  Music to my ears!  Driving over there for showers that night was like going to the spa!

 

And now I have to confess how much I LOVE…

warm showers…

cold chardonnay…

running water from the tap…

internet on my laptop…

and light when I flick a switch.  

 

And I daresay that I speak for most of the population of Southeastern CT! 

 

Irene, it was nice knowin’ ya, but I’m glad you’re GONE!