Home again, safe and sound. Mahdee managed to suddenly grow a green grass beard along her (South-facing) port side in the 10 days we were gone. Amazing. We haven’t had to clean the hull since last October and suddenly she’s green with 3″ of grass all in 10 days!
This afternoon’s storm moving in right before sunset.
Yesterday, on the way home from our last meet-up with friends before our flight out this morning, we stopped by the local Safeway to buy all the makings of decadence. Ah, what would that be? The stuff needed to bake chocolate chip peanut butter cookies and walnut fudge brownies. Among the best things in life. Especially when we can find yummy dairy-free Guittard chocolate chips. Yes, we bought Guittard chips. It was raining when we left Gaithersburg; sleet by the time we arrived at the grocery in Potomac; the snow was covering the ice with a pretty thick dusting by the time we arrived home at Monica’s house.
The tempo of the snow falling increased and the radio announced that people were abandoning their cars on the Capital Beltway. I baked cookies while David and Sarah kept their noses buried in their respective computers. The lights flickered frequently enough for us to get out a flashlight as well as find the candles and matches. Sarah told us about last year’s big storm and how they lost power during it. Great. Softball practice was canceled–no kidding.
Then we had a big “BOOM!” bang out back along with a blue-white flash of light and the power blacked out for a few seconds. Long enough for us to think that we’d lost power. Ah, but it was just a teaser and the power returned. Sigh. Good. As it turns out, there’s a transformer down the way that makes a habit of flashing light and big noises during storms. All part of normal storm behavior around here. About 10 minutes later, I heard a crack…craaaaaack…wooooosh…followed by a house-shaking and thunderous rumble. It sounded like a huge tree had fallen on the house but as it turned out (thank goodness) nothing so grand–it was simply half of a normal-sized tree. Luckily the power stayed with us.
David went outside to shovel snow and I continued on into making salad and chicken for dinner. Cooking is always a good diversion for worry. Monica and Bob eventually made their separate ways home. Monica and David finishing up the shoveling in the falling snow and rearranging the cars at the bottom of the driveway hill so we could all leave in the morning. While we watched a DVD, our airline called to let us know our flight was canceled.
And now we sit here looking at the lovely snow outside and enjoying our winter interlude.
Thursday was my birthday and we happily spent it quietly going about our business and doing little things needed to be done. I’d say the highlight of my birthday was the confirmed consolidation of data and programs, by David, on numerous old hard drives onto a single newer hard drive so the old drives could be chucked for good! When we replace a computer with a newer one, we have a habit of keeping functional hard drives (with their data/programs intact) “just in case” of needing the drive. While the important data on hard drives has always been backed up to the new drives or onto CD/DVD disks, the programs are left in place on the old drives; we had a stack of 5 or 6 such drives dating back to around 2001 that just needed to “go away.” They’re now “history” as the saying goes: no more, gone-zo! It doesn’t lighten the boat since they were in the little storage unit here in San Diego but it is just another thing that had to be tossed so we can get rid of that storage unit. David, by nature, is the consummate pack-rat and keeper of all things that he might need at any point in the future. Therefore, for me, this was a very nice birthday gift.
