Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Where does the time go???

So apparently this thing is like my journal - I never update it. A lot has happened in the last few weeks. The weekend before Thanksgiving Jason's Grandma Moses died and so his mom flew up from FL for the funeral. He and his mom drove up to Brushton, NY (almost on the border of Canada) on Tues and I thought it was just going to be me and Buttons for Thanksgiving. But then they surprised me and came back Wed night instead of Thurs evening, so I was able to make Thanksgiving dinner after all (with Connie's help). It turned out great (if I do say so myself)! The pic doesn't do it justice. We just did a turkey breast since there was only the 3 of us, but it was delicious.

Then, at some point in the week, Jason's mom scared the birds as she walked by their cages and Mr Nently flew into the dishwater. He got so soaked he couldn't even fly. He was covered in soap bubbles so I had to hold him under the water to wash him off and he tried to fly off again. He splatted to the floor since he couldn't fly. It was pathetic. Here he is trying to dry off next to Mrs Nently.


On Black Fri I went out at 6:30 with my friend Rachel who was a week from her due date. She'd never been shopping on Black Friday before and wanted to go. In between shopping I took her to a doctor's appt where they told her they wanted to induce her on Mon. She looked overwhelmed and like she wanted to cry. But then she said "Well, let's go shop some more!", so off we went. When I got home Jason was gone to work on one of our cars so it would pass inspection, but my mother-in-law, Connie was there. She told me to look at the birds. We were down 1 lovebird. I asked where Mrs Nently was, and it turns out Jason was cleaning the cages earlier in the day with the door open and Mrs flew the coop. Unfortunately for her it got down to about 20 degrees that night, so unless somebody found her and took her in, she's in the big bird cage in the sky. I'm not sure that Mr Nently realizes that anythings different. They're very simple birds, and other than the occasional bored thought I'm sure he has, I doubt he even knows she's gone. We've also determined that she was the worst offender for throwing seed and for only eating the sunflower seeds. We hardly ever have to clean around the cages now that she's gone and the other seeds are getting eaten, not just the sunflower seeds. It's really too bad that it happened, but since they're rather expensive, we're not going to rush out and replace her.

Then last weekend we had freezing rain. It doesn't sound too bad until you realize that when rain freezes on trees it becomes very heavy, breaking the limbs and branches, sometimes uprooting the whole tree. When the limbs come down they can cause a lot of damage. On Thurs night I got out of work and my car was one big ice cicle. It was still raining and rained through the night. I didn't sleep well because I kept hearing crashes and I kept worrying that things were falling on our car. And Buttons must have been bothered by the storm because she kept wandering into the bedroom once or twice an hour and waking me up. We have hardwood floors and her nails click loudly on them. I woke up once and the clock was blinking, so I reset it and went back to sleep. Then when I finally woke up for good the clock was out. I had no idea what time it was because it was cloudy outside. I looked out the back window and there were wires and cables down in our back yard and large limbs everywhere. Then I went to the front and looked at the cars. Fortunately nothing had fallen on them. I called the power company and reported the outage. It was about 6:30 by then so I got ready and went to work. Jason didn't have school that day, but he did have an awards ceremony I was leaving work at 1:00 for, so when I got home, we went to that, but it was canceled because of the storm. Some people were without power for 4 days. We were only without until early Sat morn. We have a gas fireplace so we stayed warm and we have a grill so we cooked on that. It was plenty cold, so we put all the food in two coolers and put it in the garage. Some people in our ward had to go stay with others, some had kerosene heaters, and some just toughed it out. Jason's dad didn't get power back until Sunday. We had candles going all over the house, but no matter what it shows in the movies, 1, 2 or even 4 candles, won't give off that much light. We need to get some lanterns. But all in all we fared pretty well. Over 300,000 people lost power in NY and MA, and then NH got the same storm and another 200,000 lost power there. The power company finally came by and fixed the wires in back, but the limbs are still back there. A guy at work said he thinks I can borrow his father-in-law's chainsaw to cut them up. I saw one house that had a tree down across the driveway with 2 cars underneath. But most of the damage seemed to be just the trees themselves. Sorry this is so long.
Anything else? Oh, yeah. Jason was the Narrator for the Stake Christmas Devotional this last Sunday. He has a really nice voice and several people came up to him afterwards and told him he should do that for a living. Maybe as a side job. He's taking finals this week and then he's done with this semester. Only 2 more to go!!!










3 comments:

Jaime said...

It's funny that Mr. Nently wanted a bath in the dishwasher. I'm sorry to hear about Mrs. Nently. I'm sure she's happy where ever she is. You're lucky you are prepared for emergencies. The prophet always talks about being prepared & people don't realize it could be something as easy as a power outage for several days, but I'm glad you were ready for it. I hope we would be.

The Tani Family said...

It is so fun to be able to catch up on peoples lives this way! I am sorry that some of it isn't the funnest! We are experiencing crazy snow right now, but luckily we don't get that rain, I have heard about it though.

Ren, Anna, & Tristan said...

I'm behind on reading this!! I'm impressed with your Thanksgiving dinner!! And the dishwasher story cracked me up. Poor birds. Good for Jason for having a pleasing voice. :) Tell him to get some money out of it!