Just Too Tired

This past Monday morning, a particularly strong storm blew through our area and knocked our power out.  An astonishing number of large, mature trees were struck by lighting, snapped off at the base, or picked up and thrown by the wind.

Fortunately, our house remained unharmed.  The same cannot be said for others around here, though.

To make a long story short, our power was restored on Friday morning.  The work week was interesting, and involved things such as driving to the lake to get jugs of water to be used to flush the toilet, and taking my shampoo for a swim in the lake. 

Since the power has been restored, we've surveyed the situation and found that everything in our refrigerator went bad.  We had hoped the freezers would be okay, but those hopes were a bit naive.  The food in our small upstairs freezer was, for the most part, salvageable. 

Downstairs, however, we didn't fare so well.  Our large chest freezer apparently doesn't have as great a seal as the one up here, and we lost everything that was in it.  This includes three large fish that were waiting to be mounted: two Northern pike and one walleye.  Not only did we lose them; they also thawed completely and coated the bottom of the freezer in rotten fish sludge.

Oy.

Since our garbage collection is on Mondays, we put off the cleanup until this evening.  We figured it made more sense to let the food re-freeze, rather than plopping it all into the garbage can days in advance when the forecast called for ninety-five degree temperatures.

So, that part was a good call, at least.

Since the mount fish were now frozen in about an inch of nasty ice on the bottom of the freezer, we had to get creative to get them out.  We figured out that a hammer did a great job at breaking up the ice, so we proceeded to empty the freezer, laboriously and noisily.

One by one, I brought the huge fish up to pitch into the garbage.  On my last trip upstairs, I noticed The Princess was crying.

She was standing at the gate between the bedrooms and the living room, her face as red as could be.  Tears streamed down her face, and she wailed long and loud.

Right.  She's extremely sensitive when it comes to sound.  Why hadn't I thought of that???

After washing the scum from my hands and arms, I tried my best to comfort her while she let loose with her siren wail.  Eventually, this most pathetic of cries tapered off into a shuddering sob.  There seemed to be nothing more I could do.

And I was sweating buckets from hauling twenty-plus pound fishcicles up the stairs.

The Hubbs and I plopped in our chairs in the (much cooler) basement in an attempt to bring down our temperatures.  Through the floor, I could still hear her crying in her room.

As soon as I cooled off, I was back in her room.  I apologized for not warning her about what we were going to do downstairs and explained that, as hard as we try, sometimes these things don't occur to us until it's too late.

Now, as I sit here typing this post, she's singing herself to sleep.  I think I actually just heard her laugh.

It's been a long week around here, folks, and I'm hoping it gets back to our twisted version of normal very quickly.  As soon as that happens, you can expect the next installments of The Princess's visit to Red House.

But now?  I'm just too tired.