Arctic Cold Front

We have had a very mild fall...until now!  I have been longing for the beauty of snow covered trees and lawms.  Well Tuesday I got it.  It was only supposed to snow a little, but we got 8 inches!  Wednesday morning I awoke to one feeble chirp of the smoke alarm and then complete silence and darkness.  It was about 5am and the power was out.  About an hour later a very scared little Joseph climbed into bed between us. He had braved the darkness of the basement to come be with us.  He said he woke up and couldn't see anything and he thought he was blind.  So he felt his way to the stairs and then to our bed. The power did not come back on so school was cancelled.

We had to go to Idaho falls to pick up Scout stuff for the pack meeting, so we bundled up and headed out in the Jeep, which said it was -18 degrees.  Think about it, that is 50 degrees below freezing!  Brrr!  It was colder than its been since we moved here and I remembered that I don't have a warm winter jacket! We noticed there was no power in Rigby as we passed it on the freeway.  The scout store had power, but we heard that Ammon was out. We stopped at an Albertsons so I could use some coupons. It was fairly dark inside, but there was a young man at the door telling people they were open. I went in and it was a little spooky, but cool.  Only about 1 in 8 lights was on and one cashier was working at a checkout powered by a generator.  I decided not to hold up that slow moving line with my coupons.  We went to get gas and found that the dividing line for power was Hitt Road. One one side, warmth and power, on the other side, nothing!  By the time we got home the power was back on and poor Richard had to go to his 12:45 class.  But the kids enjoyed having a day off!

The power outage affected over 70,000 homes and the power was not restored until almost noon.  Nothing like a huge power outage in freezing cold weather to make you appreciate the blessings of technology!