Home Camping

We experience a bit of "home" camping this week. Thursday (1/21) we woke up to a cold house with no power. And although this was exciting for me at first the excitement quickly wore off. We were able to get an old (60 years old) generator from our landlord who had an extra one. This was such a huge blessing.

our generator

Unfortunately it took me a few days to see it as that (a blessing). The generator being so old and not having been used in the last 10 years had some problems staying on. During the day this wasn't as much of a problem because we (by "we" I mean Brett) could just run out and get it starting again. At night was a whole new issue. My dear husband would set his alarm for every 2 hours to go and turn it back on. The generator also sucked up fuel. Brett figured out that it probably cost us about 70 dollars a day to run the generator. And with not having power we were unable to get fuel easily. The Lord provided though and we always had enough. We had our furnace, fridge, and freezer hooked up the the generator which meant that it was pretty crucial for us to have it running. Having it turn off every few hours is what really started to get to me and also the reason I began to not see it as a blessing. Like I said, it took me a few days before I could really grasp the blessing that it was to have heat even if it did go in and out.

Pulling out our camping gear we were able to keep food in our bellies. I cooked a lot of homemade soups with whatever I had around the house. They were simple, warm, and easy to reheat on our camp stove which was essential.

browning hamburger for soup on our camp stove

Since we could only hook up the furnace and fridge/freezer we needed to have a way to cook which is where the camping gear came in really handy. We own two small backpacking stoves but last fall when we took our trip to Glacier Brett and I were doing our first "car" camping so we decided to get a bigger camp stove which looking back now we are so thankful we did. I have to admit it was kind of nice cooking on a camp stove with my Pampered Chef pans instead of our camping ones.

Brett and his best friend Luke always talk about the "winter of 97" which was apparently a terrible winter with a huge storm. Naomi (Luke's wife) and I always joke about how they refer to the "winter of 97" all the time so now we laugh about how we will talk about the "power outage of 2010".

Yesterday afternoon we got our power back on (thank you to all the men and women who were working through tough conditions to get our power back on). In total we were out of power for 6 1/2 straight days. I wore thin at times and had to apologize to my husband on more than one occasion. I broke down to tears, smelled like gas (from the generator) and wore the same clothes over and over again but...I survived. We kept relatively warm, had food in our bellies, and were able to spend extra time together (which involved games of Settler of Catan).

Here are a few pictures from our week:

bath by candle light

playing settlers by candle light

We all got stir crazy

We had our fun times as well

what our south window normally looks like
you can see our only neighbors house

we had a storm come through when the power was out
you can't see our neighbors house anymore