Spectation! And when you’re done, you’ll be

I owe you a giant entry that pretty much covers the past week. This is how I feel about that.

I hate when I get slack about entrying. Especially entries that contain pictures. Those are the ones I am best at slacking over too. Did you know I STILL HAVE NOT written the second half of my adelaide catchup entries, which includes Christmas day? I think that is a severe slack. Makes me feel better about only being a week behind.

Also, don’t you love how almost happy I look about being shot in the head by a cannon? Ellen or Jake made me laugh. Mean hilariously awesome people.

Whelp, best start at the beginning.

Sunday August 28.

Hurricane day. Power got knocked out at 9am so I decided to do a Day-In-The-Life sort of thing, seeing as the weather was so boring and we weren’t doing much, a textual entry about the day would have been more boring. Plus this way, kitties are featured.

 
 
The day started with cereal (and power!) and the cats poised and ready to almost fight over the leftover milk in my cereal bowl. I used Jake’s magical moving-stuff powers and got our recliner placed by the window so I could watch the weather while being comfortable AND having a table right next to me for all my puzzles/colouring books/DS/snacks/other supplies. Jake did his crosswords. The ceiling in the bathroom started to drip pretty early in the day, in the most inconvenient spot – right above the toilet. Thankfully Ellen had an umbrella, otherwise we probably would have had to hold a pan over our heads or something (or wear a garbage bag). So odd having to pee holding an umbrella above your head. You should try it one day.
 
 
 
Ellen and I spent a lot of the day looking out the window from our comfy spots. As you can see… the sights were pretty boring. Moey tried to rip Cookie Monster’s head off (when I asked if he was doing so because he is a cookie monster and there can be only one, he looked at me and ran away. I WAS RIGHT!) and we had our first of many boring cold lunches. Not that peanut butter sandwiches and pizza are boring, but if you are kind of STUCK with those choices, they are. (So glad we bought GIANT pizzas on Friday for dinner, we had them for so so many meals… mmm pizza)

 
 
 
When the rain stopped (at about 1pm!) we went outside because I was going kind of crazy. It was super windy, but I was still in a happy-groovy mood just being outside (if you click on the grooving picture, you can see my reaction to seeing that photo). Once the wind died down a bit, I think by about 3pm, we went for a walk around town to see if there was any damage. There wasn’t, which was nice, just a lot of big puddles, which I enjoyed jumping in. Jake’s attempts at action photos were finally successful when we got to a giant puddle near the post office that was way deeper than I expected – even if I stepped cautiously into it I would have gotten soaked halfway up my shins. Awesome jumping puddle though. Left my shoes feeling like I was still in the puddle for the rest of the walk home.

 
 
 
The rest of the afternoon was spent lazing around with a cat squashing me. Ellen made a hat from a bag of chips, because she is odd like me. For dinner we first went to the super-local grocery store to see what they had in the prepared food/salads section, but they were totally lacking, so we came home and called Senor Pancho’s to make sure they had power, and then went and had a delicious mexicany feast of HOT FOOD and tasty.

By the time we got home it was dark, so photos were not an option anymore. We lazed about in the living room, wearing glowsticks so we could at least see where the others were (and they were useful for trips to the bathroom too, just enough light!) without using up the torch batteries. Lighting candles with 3 cats around would have been very silly. I think we were in bed by 9:30, hoping the power would be back when we woke up.

Monday



No power. After breakfast (the milk was still cold! So impressive, especially considering our fridge doesn’t close completely properly.) we went for a walk to find Bacon Pond. It was incredibly disappointing and ugly, but we did pass a few streams (one super pretty one!) and use up a good portion of the morning. After a coold-down and some lunch, we went for another walk in the other direction to attempt to get some pretty water photos. That was when we went to the cannons featuredat the top of the entry. The water up the hill was out of the question because the road was closed due to a tree down. So we went to the Hollow to take pictures there, but that was also closed due to mild flooding. The walk still ended up being 40 minutes, so that was pretty good.

The hot water ran out in the afternoon, and lucky me, I got to have the first purely cold shower. I was already cold beforehand, so it took me about 2 hours to walk back up to normal temperature afterwards. Stupid long hair needing to be washed.

For dinner, we drove 45 minutes to Red Robin for delicious burgers that Ellen needed to try. We felt we NEEDED hot dinner, and besides, we would have gone there at some point of her visit anyway, why not now while we don’t have any good reason not to. Ellen and I had the exact same meal – bbq chicken sandwich and strawberry lemonade. Jake had some form of nachoey chicken wrap with giant root beer floats to accompany. SUCH GOOD FOOD. I want another burger right now thinking about how delicious that thing was.

The evening was spent the same as the day before – hanging out in the dark, wearing glowsticks, looking at the power box on the pole outside with it’s stupid flashing red light, and being creatively sweary and kind of full of rage.

Tuesday.

Woke up and got a wave of sadness bordering on depression when I saw the alarm clock still showed no numbers. From Monday morning onward that feeling got worse each time I woke. Thankfully that terribleness washed off within a few minutes because I knew there was a Jake AND an Ellen to hang out and spend the day with, as well as three cats that always want love and attention and snuggles. An hour or so later I knew we would be having delicious food AND hot showers for dinner, because we made plans with Lisa (Jake’s awesome mum) for those awesome things to occur at her place.

Most of the day was spent lazing about, me still on the recliner that was in ‘hurricane position’ but had now been renamed ‘powerless position’ or something that sounded less weird. Might be the same, might just seem odd written down. Who knows. At some point I thought I saw Rob Zombie walking down the street, but his back was facing the building by the time Jake got to a window to confirm my sighting. (A googling later on showed that I was right, that’s what I get for not really knowing what one of our neighbours looks like).

At about 2pm we headed over to Barnes & Noble so Ellen could get a new book. I got a puzzly codewords book and Jake got a middleschool algebra book filled with exercise sheets. He is adorable and has been "craving algebra" for ages so that was a good find. We got bored there pretty quickly so we headed over to New London to see Lisa. She made us so much delicious food. I had asked for breaded chicken cutlets and pasta, but she also made us a ham! AND she had hard boiled eggs just hanging around! I ADORE hard boiled eggs, so much tasty in those things. Yummo. Jake and I had a delicious warm/hot shower and got nice and clean, my phone got recharged, and we got to hang out with Lisa, who was happy that we were there, regardless of why.

After about 4 hours, we headed home, where we were greeted by a completely powerless town. No traffic lights, no street lamps, no other cars driving around… so creepy. Of course, even before I (would normally be able to) could see home, I saw the evil blinking red light just past it. The lovely company and food and such had set me in a much better mood though, so I did not go to bed full of rage.

Wednesday.

No power. Still. The fridge smells so bad that opening it to get the orange juice out was a strong effort in can-I-not-puke? Thankfully by the time lunch rolls around, I open the fridge to get the mustard and BAM! We have a shiny (and slightly confusing to my no-power mind) light on! The day wasn’t quite perfect because the internet did not come back (that’s a lie, we had internet and tv for about 2 minutes in the evening) but we could use the internet on my phone as much as we wanted and who cares about draining the battery, we can just recharge it YAY! (I think I recharged it at least twice during the day)

We cleaned out the freezer after lunch, so many things got tossed. Actually, pretty much everything got tossed. The few things that stayed were frozen broccoli, a box of popsicles (that have now been turned into icecubes because they weren’t edible as popsicles anymore), some naan and some garlic bread. Oh, and a container of homemade pasta sauce, somehow that barely even began to defrost. The bottom shelf lasted way better than the top. That’s probably how.

Once things got cold again, and I felt safe keeping the fridge door open for a period of time, we cleared out the fridge. Milk, yogurt, eggs, and I think a jar of sauce that I had been meaning to get rid of anyway. Not bad. All the veggies felt perfect still.

We got to watch recorded Late Late Show, and we had the hot meal we had been planning for days as our celebration-of-power meal. Beans and eggs on toast. So good, so simple, so beany, so delicious. YUM. Ellen likes beans as much as Jake and I do, which is awesome. We got the ham bone from dinner with Lisa so we are going to have beans and cornbread for dinner one day. YUM!

Thursday.

Jake worked, Ellen and I used the internet (and played loads of bejeweled) pretty much all day. In the evening we were happy to just be able to watch Cash Cab (something we do a lot with Ellen here, it’s the thing to do!) with our dinner of pasta and garlic bread – using up things from the freezer that were ok but we didn’t want to keep around much longer.

Friday.

Jake worked again. After work we went grocery shopping, where we stocked up on a bunch of stuff (stuff was on sale, stuff we needed, yay!)

Saturday.

Jake worked again today, they needed him. He loves his job, so he doesn’t mind working the occasional Saturday. Ellen and I went to Quest so they could steal my blood. They only took one vial this time AND they didn’t need my pee. It was surprising, I was expecting the same as last time – 5 vials and pee in a cup. I had the pee ready this time too! Ah well, their loss. I have a bruise on my arm that keeps weirding me out, I don’t think I’ve ever been bruised from blood-removal like that before.

After de-bloodening, we went on a mission to find a turkey breast, for we are going to have roast turkey and other goodies this weekend (tomorrow night’s dinner! Mini pretend thanksgiving! Yum!) and Stop & Shop didn’t have them yesterday. We found one straight away, so that was easy. Then we went to Kmart, where I acquired not only a gravy boat (something I need for real thanksgiving) but a new webcam to replace the I-think-always-crappy 6 year old one that we had previously. Ellen needs one for tonight so she can Skype with her family, and I was going to get one eventually anyway so the baby’s grandparents could see it easily, so it was nice that we found a pretty decent cheapone. Yay, successful purchasing!

This afternoon I have made brine for the turkey, and I have wrote this stupidly gigantic entry. If you read the whole thing, you deserve a cookie.

Title: The full quote is "Spectation! And when you’re done, you’ll be EXPECTATION!" which was Ellen commenting on my getting the recliner positioned next to the window to watch the rain.