December First

Seeing as it is right before the holidays, things have been busy. Not only that, I've been tired, thus the lack of posts.

The last two weeks have been pretty good, with the exception of the wrath of God, I mean windstorm we went through. Last Thursday morning, and I mean 12:01 a.m., we had a child who would not sleep. Our youngest has autism, and one of the interesting things about autistic children is they tend to have sleep problems. He sleeps really well, once we get him to sleep. We have to give him medicine to get there, usually.

Wednesday, November 30, 2011, we gave him his usual medication. We waited about three hours, and when he still wasn't asleep gave him some melatonin, an over the counter supplement. Melatonin is a chemical your brain produces when you should be going to sleep. So when the sun goes down, and you feel sleepy, that is partially from an increase of melatonin in your brain, or the long day you just went through. This still didn't produce any results except for happy screaming child jumping on our bed.

I had to work, so I was banished to sleep on the couch. My lovely wife sacrificed herself for my sake. (I read a study awhile ago that indicated that women who don't get enough sleep report it causing major strains in their relationships, where as men who didn't get enough sleep reported no change. Weird.) I woke up a little after 4:00 a.m. to hear major winds. This was to be expected as the weather man had indicated we would receive winds up to 70 mph. I went and traded places with my wife to let her get a few hours of shut-eye. I usually go to the gym, and thought I might have a chance if the youngest went to sleep. I laid down with him, and turned off all stimulus I could find. I finally got him to sleep about 6 a.m., when I was supposed to be at the gym. This is the same time that our power went out.

Now we have been lucky over the years, and have only lost power on 2-3 occasions. We live in an overlap area on the power grid. If the homes East of us lose power, we get it from the West side, and vice-a-versa. We went completely down. I woke my wife up to deal with the older children, and drove up to the gym. While trying to pull the van out of the driveway, it felt like the parking brake was on, but it was just the wind. I saw trees blown over, fences felled, and even street signs on the road. Also, no one had any power, not even the gym. I turned around and went home to get ready for work in the dark.

I usually take the train to work, and this was no exception. I live exactly .5 miles from the train station, so decided to walk, like usual. (I mainly did this because my wife had only been asleep for about one hour and forty-five minutes.) I will say that walking in 70+ mile an hour winds is an adventure. I was so cold. I was even whipped in the eye by a tree branch blown from across the street. I felt pretty lucky seeing the carnage a block North of our house. We are pretty sheltered and only lost a few shingles. There were houses that weren't even 10 years old that had lost the roofing on one side of their house. The really sad thing was the trees that were lost. Just East of the city cemetery there are 80 foot spruce trees. Now there are far fewer. The damage was even worse a little further North. I saw some pictures of stores that looked like a bomb had gone off in them.

Crazy.

Well, that's all the time I have right now. I'm going to try and get a post in later on my new "flush" I'm doing. Happy Friday