Thanks to one hellatious thunder/lightning storm Monday night, we lost power at the house. I had to go to work at 2:00am Tuesday morning, so I had gone to bed early. Only to be awoken by the sound of my UPS alarms in the office. I got up, reset the alarms and went downstairs to get a better look at the lightning storm that was just getting underway.

Heather and I were looking out the patio at the awesome streaks of white across the sky when we heard a crack, then the skies behind our neighbors townhouse turned green..then the everything went dead in the house. Uh oh….. there went the transformer. Luckily we still had the camper in the garage, so we had pleanty of lanterns/flashlights at the ready. We set our battery alarm clocks and went to bed… in the nice HOT house (no electricity….no A/C). When I woke up at 12:30 to go to work, the power was still off. It’s kinda eery to take a shower by lantern light.

Driving to work was darker than usual as most of the neighborhoods were without power still. Work was uneventful and Heather called at 5:30am to report we still had no power. At this point I was beginning to worry about the food we just put in the fridge the night before. I left work early to go home and pickup Caryl’s generator to get the fridge back online.

It’s kinda funny how you take electricity for granted until you don’t have it for 21 freakin hours. ComEd finally got the power back online around 7:00pm. Many of the neighbors lost a ton of food to the power loss. Thankfully due to the handy lil Coleman generator, our only loss was ice cubes. I’m sure the neighbors just loved listening to the generator running for 12+ hours in the driveway.

Wednesday night/Thursday morning we had another pretty nasty storm. Heather said the lights flickered a lil bit, and my first thoughts were… drag out the generator..again! But the storm passed and the lights stayed on.

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve made a post. Savannah’s growing like a weed and she’s cruizing like crazy now that she’s walking. This past holiday weekend we made the 6 hour trek upto Christina & Kevin’s cabin up in Pelican Lake, WI. Talk about being in the middle of nowhere. We towed the camper up there and setup camp next to their cabin. The weather was great all weekend, had a couple little showers here and there, but nothing to ruin the trip. Sunday we went out on Lake Tomahawk in Kevin’s fishing boat. Savannah wasn’t too keen on the choppy water. But Otis on the other hand was living it up on the boat. He got to ride up front with me and was diggin’ the wind blowing his ears.

We dropped the women and children off at the beach and Kevin and I went out to do a ‘lil fishing.

I managed to pluck out a small bass, and a 12lb seaweed! Oh well, I still had a good time.

The rest of the weekend we spent just chilling out and enjoying being in the middle of nowhere. At night it was dead silent in the North woods. Tuesday we arrived back home and had the camper unloaded in time to catch the fireworks in Barrington. We got primo parking up front thanks to Doris and her parking pass for work. Last year Savannah slept through the fireworks at home, so this year we wanted to make sure she got to see them.

I don’t think she blinked the entire time during the show. She sat in her chair pointing at them, man it was cute to see the awe and wonder in her face.

We have more pictures from the summer here