Powerless

The power was out at our house for about 15 hours yesterday. We were swaddled in blankets, drinking hot mint tea, starting to get kind of depressed, when it came on late in the afternoon. People on the block were talking about getting hotel rooms for the night, and finding themselves not as prepared as they should have been. The Seattle City Light employee I spoke with said there were so many trees that had taken down power lines, they were going to be working around the clock to repair the damage. He told me there was power downtown, since there weren't trees to knock it out, and we could go somewhere downtown to get warm. My mother told me I should have asked him if we could come sit in his office until our power came back on. She kept her spirits up pretty well.
Terrible tales of damage and death, the worst being a woman who did books on tape for a living drowning in her basement when a four foot wall of water swept down an embankment and collapsed her foundation; it was in a cool little neighborhood near a school at which I used to work. They sent scuba divers in to try to find her, but it was too late.
We just had to stay warm all day, and were jubilant when the furnace kicked back on.