What is with this weather?!!!

Wow, what a week this has been.   Last Sunday and Monday, we were out enjoying the near 70 degree weather and loving it, and by Tuesday night and all day Wednesday, we were in the middle of a huge ice storm.  In Georgia!

That is all ice and a lot of the trees in the background had broken limbs.

Wednesday was alright, we were cozy in our home and Joe was home from work and the kids home from school.  There was freezing rain all day that coated all the trees and roads and everything.  Then everything started to go downhill from there.  Wednesday night about 10:00 we lost power.  I was expecting it as all the neighborhoods around us went out one by one throughout the day.  Okay, I could handle the power out, we were all in bed anyway.  Thursday morning we wake up and the house is a cool 60 degrees and still no power.  I am still ok, as I can certainly handle a day without power.  We all put layers of clothes on and the kids played inside and out, and we ate what we could find without heating anything up.  We put some of our cold stuff in a cooler outside so it would stay cold.  We used our grill to heat up some chili.  By night time, we were sitting around with candles and flashlight telling stories and we all went to bed early and slept together to keep warm.  By Friday morning, we still didn't have power so we went over to a friends house in a different neighborhood that did have power, and we showered and had a hot meal.  Then we ran some errands and basically were just waiting for the electricity to come back on.  It was so cold in our house- it got down to like 52 degrees!  By mid-morning, the rest of the neighborhood had power except for our street.  What!?  So I was hopeful that ours would come back on soon.  By late afternoon, I was at the end of my rope and there may have been some tears shed.  I was so frustrated and cold.  We went back over to our friends for supper and while we were there my neighbor called and said we had power!  Yay!  They had it marked on their map that our street did have power, until one of my neighbors went to the meeting site of all the power trucks and informed them that we didn't.  Who knows when we would have gotten power if he hadn't gone down there!

So then, after the kids were in bed and the house was warm again and I was enjoying a hot bath, all the sudden we felt an earthquake!  What!?!  It shook the whole house and we had no idea what was going on.  I thought our house was going to collapse!  It was a 4.4 earthquake with the epicenter of it only about 50-60 miles from us.  Crazy!

It was a really bad storm for our area.  Lots of trees down from the weight of the ice, tens of thousands without power and trees falling on houses and cars.  It will take a while to clean up.

I have never loved my heat and hot water and electricity so much in my life!  And I have even loved and appreciated doing 7 loads of laundry the next day!  The kids were AWESOME during this whole time.  Didn't affect them one bit.  They never said once they were cold, or wanted to watch TV or whined about anything.  They just played all day like nothing was even wrong.  Meanwhile, the running dialog in my head was complaint after complaint and by the end all my complaints and whining were coming out of my mouth.  So much for mom keeping it together!  I definitely need to take a cue from the kids and think of it as an adventure and not let it get the best of me.  And I felt like a spoiled brat that couldn't live without power for 48 hours when people all over the world live much worse than that all the time.  Makes me realize how much I take for granted, that's for sure.

I hope no other natural disasters happen in the last few weeks we are here!