Power Issues

I have power, I always had power, and I share my power with others. The power has not gone off at my house, regardless of what you may have heard on CNN and NPR. If the President hadn’t visited the NAACP the St. Louis power outage would have been the #1 story of the day.

Of course, I do not have:
Half the Elm tree I had before
$250 insurance deductible

I do have :
The life I risked driving through the storm that only comes once a century, in which the wind bloweth North to South, not West to East.
Insurance to pay the $1800 bill to take the limb off the roof.
An $1800 estimate on taking down the other half of the Elm tree.
Almost enough money in the savings to pay for that.
Credit.
A reasonable Mom who came to my house last night when her power went out so the National Guard will not have to wrestle her to the ground.
A sane husband, even though he comes from a family of lunatics. Oh! Let’s talk about the lunatics. Shall we? I believe we shall.

Karen and Mr. Wonderful also have power, and when she heard this morning my in-laws were without power she started a browbeating campaign to get them out to her house. As it turns out, the water in both our parent’s neighborhoods was contaminated by some power-related issue, and the in-laws had no water to drink in the 101 degree heat. Eventually they caved, packed up the Nazi dog, and Mr. Wonderful drove them to the House of Wonderful and plunked them down in front of an air conditioning vent.

Then the S______s realized they had left behind a freezer full of meat.

The meat was lying helpless, sweating and uncomfortable, getting warmer and warmer, more and more microbial. Gary was commissioned to go rescue the meat. He raced to his parents where he expected to see hot sweaty cranky steaks pounding on the door of the freezer. He called his parents.

“I came here to save this stuff? Chicken breasts? Hamburger?”
“But the pork chops? How are they?”
“If they weren’t in the freezer, they are gone, Mom. Everything in the fridge is room temperature. I had to abandon the pork chops.” (Much wailing from Wilma.)

The S______s mourned the loss of the pork chops quietly until Gary got a call at 6:20.

“Gary!” Wilma insisted, “You have to drive us home right now. Our power is back.”
“But there still is no water. Besides, wouldn’t you want [Mr. Wonderful] to drive you back in the Cadillac?”
“No, he has a reality show he has to watch, and he can’t watch it and get us home by seven.”
“Why do you have to be home by seven?”
“The National Weather Service says there’s going to be another thunderstorm between seven and ten.”
“I think that’s just a thunderstorm watch, Mom. I don’t think it means there’s a thunderstorm starting at seven on the dot.”
“Well, there might be one, and so you have to drive us home and get back to your house by seven.” (This would be fine if we didn’t live 22 miles away from them. Well, and if they were capable of saying goodbye without ten minutes of hugs and kisses and don’t forget and blowing kisses and I could go on.)

Gary replied he did not have the keys to his magic plane and he would be unable to transport them to their house and get back before The Storm was scheduled to begin at seven, so they would have to put up with their daughter bossing them another night. He hung up and looked at my mom as if to say “my parents are crazy.” And then he said “My parents are crazy.”

My Supremely Rational Mom of course is going to spend the night here, and she told him she might never leave, just to scare him. Cackle!