Doesn't seem like that long, does it?? It's just over two and a half days. Not bad, right??

It is if that's how long you were without power.

Seattle was hit by a bad windstorm Friday night. The problem here is that we've had tons of rain, and most if not all of our power lines are above ground. The oversaturated ground could not hold the trees upright that were being whipped in all directions by the fierce winds, so the trees toppled -- right into many, many power lines.

About 140,000 people in the Puget Sound region were without power for a time on Saturday.

The power went out here in our house at 5am. I am told by my neighbor that the power came back on around 8am for a half-hour, but I had finally fallen back asleep after being awake from 5 to 7am, worrying about the power outage.

On Saturday we decided to go to the local mall to stay warm and to get some hot food. I was loathe to open either refrigerator for any reason; in fact, the only time I opened the fridge was to get the icemaker bin out so the ice would quit leaking all over the kitchen floor.

As we arrived home Saturday night, after nightfall, we were encouraged by all the lights we saw. We came up the ginormous hill to our housing development, and everyone had power. Everyone... until we turned onto our street. The one street in the neighborhood that did not have power was our street.

The power company kept telling us that sometimes it will happen that one street will have power when all the other areas do because it's on a different circuit. They also told us that it's possible someone was working on our problem without our being able to see a crew because our problem could be in a totally different area.

Yes, I agree with that. But I know that wasn't what was wrong with our neighborhood. I know this because a crew had to come out physically to our street, drive up and down our short little street (which is a max of a half-mile long), and finally pinpoint the problem to one specific pole. Yet we were forced to be without power for sixty-two hours, when all around us, people had only been without power for seven hours at the longest.

Some of the representatives from the power company that we called were really quite helpful. Most just said, "I'm sorry; that's all the information I have," which we know was BS because we'd gotten more help from other representatives.

I realize that the power company was unbelievably busy the first day of the outage due to the mass quantities of people out of power. They pulled in crews from out of state in order to help out, which I thought was a great idea. The problem is we were pretty much the last people to get our power back in our county. In fact, the power had come back on in a town north of us, but had gone out again. Most crews were then dispatched to that town in order to get the power back on, while we hadn't had any power in two and a half days.

We had to spend most of our time out of the house, since it was only 50 degrees inside, and Grace can't really keep herself very warm. Fortunately we were able to see part of the Super Bowl, in high-definition, no less, at the fancy mall on the other side of the water.

It just sucked that Kurt had most of Saturday, all of Sunday, and all of Monday off (it was compensation for having to work on Saturday), but we had to spend it fretting about the power outage, and where we were going to go, and how we were going to keep Gracie warm.

The other thing is I don't think we lost much in the refrigerators during the power outage, even though the power was out for so long. With the house so cold, the inside fridge never got very warm, and the garage fridge had no chance to get warm when it was only 40 degrees outside. Even all of our frozen stuff was still mostly frozen by the time the power came back on last night. I'm very thankful for that because I had just done my biweekly commissary run for groceries!

I did have to dump the two open gallons of milk in the fridge because they were just starting to turn sour, and I threw out all of our leftovers. Everything else seems just fine.

It's amazing how important electricity is to us nowadays. I know people used to live just fine without it, but then they had a woodstove to cook on and to keep the house warm. Without any means of heating the house or cooking or even boiling water for tea or coffee, it was a miserable few days. It made me long for Virginia, where at least we had gas heat and a gas stove. At least we have mild winters here in Washington. I can't imagine what we would have done if the power had been out so long in say, Minnesota or Wisconsin. Brrrrrr!!!

The ironic part of the whole thing?? We had two straight days of sunny, beautiful weather here in Seattle. Finally, a break from the gloom and the rain!! Just without electricity.