Reeling in the years

It's been a while since I posted. I started to think that the content was not interesting to the audience. I have finally realized that the audience is rather small - probably just me - and I can't impress or disappoint myself, so I may as well start again. (No, I can't explain - it made sense at the time.)

We've just come out of a long, dark period. A major storm blew through the metropolitan Seattle area a week ago - Thursday night, 14 December 2006. It started with a few hours of pouring rain, almost three inches - an amount we normally get in a month. This was followed by strong winds - sustained at 50 mph. Trees started falling.

Although our home was not hit by anything falling, there were hundreds of thousands of homes without power as trees struck power lines. Ours was one of the many dark ones. We spend Friday thinking power would be restored shortly and we could resume our normal lives for the weekend. Not so. We finally had power restored Tuesday morning. Fortunately, we have a fireplace, but we had to source firewood from friends and neighbors. The furnace was inop (electric fan for circulation), but the hot water heater worked (natural gas). Washing the dishes has never been so popular. We dug out our camping gear - sleeping bags, flashlights, lanterns, and so on.

Once power was restored, we quickly forgot the hardships and returned to our normal, posh life. Lights, heat, computers, music, and garage door openers. As the Horsey cartoon (Seattle P-I) says, there's a thin line between civilization and nature.