Blackout

Hurricane Ike made it's way up to Ohio this past weekend, on Sunday, Sept 14th, with tropical storm winds (40 mph) with Category 1 Hurricane gusts of wind (75 mph)! I thought Ohio was as land-locked as it gets--who knew that we could a tropical storm?! As a result over 900,000 customers in Cincinnati lost power on Sunday--affecting well over 1 million people! All of Ohio was affected by this storm--the largest power outage of the state's history. Two days later, still 500,000 Cincinnati customers remained without power. We were one of those families . . . in fact we remained without power for greater than 4 days!! These were long, trying 4 days, especially since it was expected to continue work-as-usual. Finally, at our wits-end, we awoke this morning with power!!
It has been a long, challenging week managing work, a 4-month-old, finding a way to store my pumped breast milk each day, finding warm water to wash the supplies (we have an electric water heater), finding a place to take a warm shower, eating out every night, and washing our clothes at a laundry mat before going out of town this weekend.

Thankfully, Dustin's store didn't lose power, and Sunday night we moved my precious 180 ounces of frozen pumped breast milk to his freezer. This is liquid gold, and I immediately was concerned about it when the power went out. I am so thankful for the back-up location!! The thought of losing this supply makes me shudder . . . Monday morning we moved our salmon fillets and recently-stocked freezer of Lean Cuisines, etc. to his freezer as well. We lost everything else in our fridge and freezer (but thankfully was not super-full!). But really, things could have been way-worse. The weather has been nice and cool. We still have running water and toilets that flush. No trees fell our our house (although one is very close to doing so), and we are healthy and safe.

The images here are actually from a T-shirt being sold to remember the event. I think it's pretty funny (http://lookatmeshirts.com/details.php?pid=394). From the website: "No one saw it coming... no even Derek. The sun was shinning, the bengals were losing, it seemed like a normal day in Cincinnati. And then the wind picked up... and it blew harder... and it blew harder. Electric went out...which blew more. But we came together and we survived. Join with us and celebrate as we pay tribute to the Cincinnati Hurricane that ripped through the Tristate on September 14th, 2008."
(Derek is our local weather man that has his own jingle ringing: "Derek said it would be like this.")

All this said, I was planning on doing some mega-updating on this blog Sunday. I have the pictures and videos downloaded and ready for the posting. It figures that the power went out right at 1pm on Sunday. I apologize for the poor updating!!! I promise I won't be this bad for good--I had a lot of deadlines recently at once (a few presentations, posters, late shifts, and events I have been involved in planning). Excuses, excuses, I know. Just know that I love bragging on little Levi and am aching for the chance to do so on here!
Meanwhile, we "celebrated" his 4 month old birthday two days ago (read: I sang to him). He's getting so big! His laughing occasionally, reaching out and grabbing toys, and just found his feet this past Saturday, September 13th. He's so precious, and I can't wait to show everyone else.