My Horrible, Very Bad, No Good Day

You are cordially invited to join my pity party. Come on in the water’s fine.
I’ve told you how much I detest Iowa winters right? Right, let me reiterate that, I AM NOT A FAN OF WINTER, ESPECIALLY IN IOWA . Mother Nature added one more reason to my mile long list of reasons we are not friends, this week when she sent us the Ice Storm of 2010. Oh it’s all fun and games and pretty UNTIL SOMEONE LOSES ELECTRICITY! Yeah that’s right. Let’s recap my day yesterday shall we?

*Had to RUSH from work to pick up the kids from school on time because buses were running on hard surfaces only and apparently gravel is NOT a hard surface. WHATEVER. Felt pretty darn hard when my bike and I wiped out on it last summer.

*Because I am so unaccustomed to picking the kids up from school I was honked at, cussed at, and given many a dirty look for cutting thru the pickup line. How was I to know there was a LINE? I was just trying to park. Geesh people.

*After enduring the parking lot trauma, went into the school to find my darling angels, only to be greeted with immediate FIGHTING, WHINING, AND COMPLAINING. Ummm remind me why I picked them up again?

*Aforementioned behavior continued all the way home, no matter how loud I turned up my happy music, they just got louder, and my blood pressure got higher. The first of many times I would sing “Jesus, Take the Wheel” over the course of the night.

*Played slip and slide from the driveway to our front door, nearly bit it numerous times.

*Walked in the house and noticed it felt remarkably chilly. Did a brief walkaround and discovered WE HAD NO ELECTRICITY. Went to that breaker box thing and flipped some breakers. Felt very independent womanish. Yay me! Except it didn’t work, still no power.

*Went back outside to take pictures of the pretty culprit of our current dismal situation..the ice. The same ice that robbed us of electricity also took out half of our giant tree in the front yard and parts of the trees lining the ditch. But it really did look pretty. Slid back inside to upload said pictures only to be reminded that WE HAD NO ELECTRICITY.

*Channeled my inner frontier woman and tried to start a fire in the fireplace and play board games with the kids by the light of the fire and the fading daylight. How quaint huh? Yeah not so much. Mission Firestarter: FAIL. Mission Play w/ Board Games Harmoniously: FAIL. Mission Kids Play with Fire While Mama Downs Some Advil and Lays on the Couch: ACCOMPLISHED. Loudly and sternly repeating to the kids ‘STAY AWAY FROM THE FIREPLACE” and “QUIT PLAYING WITH THE FIRE” does ZERO for one’s headache, in case you were wondering. Jesus, take the wheel…again.

*As the daylight started to fade, stomachs started growling, and moods declined even more. I made the executive decision to feed and distract by a little trip to town. Thinking that maybe by the time we eat a nice dinner in town and come home our electricity would be back on. Riiiight cuz that’s how my luck goes. Got the kids in the car and went to start it only to discover I didn’t have the keys. Odd. I went back in the house, searched, came up empty handed. Keep in mind I’d driven home using those same keys not 2 hours earlier, and had only been in my front yard and in the house. Twenty minutes of retracing my steps turned up nothing. Seriously. All of the sudden the Princess Mobile began honking wildly with lights flashing. Awesome, one of the kids found the keys!!! Except they didn’t. Nice, so now in addition to Mother Nature being evil, the kids being crabby, the universe was toying with me. We resumed our search and just as I was about to call 911 to come take me to the psych ward, I spotted them hanging on the coat closet door. Don’t ask me how they got there, I have no idea. And as for hitting the Alarm button I blame Moose.

*You may be wondering where GI Joe was during all of this? That makes 2 of us. I tease, he was at work doing recruiter stuff in his WARM, electricity filled office. So the kids and I made the trek into town during which I had a major bad mom meltdown and demanded that everyone be silent and not move a muscle for duration of the 20 minute drive, I was fed up. I’m so glad I already forfeited my Mother of the Year award because after last night it’s LONG gone. Judge me if you must, I’m just keeping it real here. We had a fairly uneventful dinner, minus the 1764 times that EACH. CHILD. HAD. TO. USE. THE. BATHROOM, which put me in a bit of a quandary. Do I stay with the kids who did not have to go? Make them all go every time one had to go? Or do I escort the one that did have to go? Single parenthood is not for me. We survived dinner somehow and I decided that we needed to kill a little bit more time just to ensure our power would be back when we got home, so we went to the Depot, you know the orange one (I don’t think I’m supposed to say their name), as I’m in the market for some new bathroom fixtures and a living room rug. As I was perusing the rugs, I turned around and discovered my children taking turns RIDING THE ROLLS OF CARPET on display. You have got to be kidding me. Right about then the recording came over the loud speaker saying “Parents, children should be attended at all times to avoid injuries.” Hmmmm coincidence? I think not. Thanks Depot for that oh so subtle reminder. After a firm..ahem..discussion with the kids about the rules of behavior for public places we continued perusing until the potty game started again. I’m not kidding you when I say by the time we left there I had written a very catchy “3 children Free to Good Home” ad to be posted on Craig’s List. JESUS, TAKE THE WHEEL….HURRY!

*That was enough for me. I figured I’d rather endure a cold, dark house than go one more place with the 3 hoodlums. So homeward bound we went. By this time GI Joe was done “working” and was on his way home too. Finally backup! I was confident our power would be back on too, after all I’d given MidAmerican Energy 4 hours to rectify the situation. Plenty of time. We arrived home and found our house still cold and dark. We decided rather than packing up and going to a hotel we’d just suck it up and pray that the power came back on during the night so we wouldn’t die as popsicles. Everyone bundled up by the light of candlelight and a work light powered by GI Joe’s drill battery, utilized every blanket in the place and off to bed we went. At about 11:30 we were awakened by the sights and sounds of EVERYTHING including every light in the house coming back on. Yay!!! Restored.
All was well until about 3 hours later at 2 in the morning (FYI: that’s a NKOTB song and if Annette and I were reading this out loud to you right now we’d break into song.."2 in the morning, girl whatcha you wanna do..do you wanna fight..."), the phone rang. I don’t know about you but when the phone rings at odd hours of the night I always assume the worst. Nothing good happens between 10pm and 5am. I glanced at the # and decided it wasn’t a familiar area code or number so it couldn’t be anything bad regarding any member of my family so I let it go to voicemail. Which would’ve been a fine idea except that my phone kept making the alert sound every 5 minutes reminding me I had a voicemail. I finally checked the voicemail and guess who it was from? MID AMERICAN ENERGY! They called to let me know our power had been restored. Nice timing there MAE, we figured that out 3 hours earlier.

*After a short night, I stumbled to the kitchen this morning to start the coffee, thinking that today certainly had to be better than yesterday and congratulating myself on having power again. I hit the brew button on the coffee pot…nothing, hit it again…nothing. Unplugged it and plugged it back in…still nothing. (FYI: Really NOT a morning person and coffee made and delivered to me by GI Joe is the only thing that gets me out of bed most mornings.) Teetered on the brink of insanity while murmuring this prayer “Dear God, I realize I should be thankful for having electricity and I am, but right now I really really need this coffeepot to work. Remember my horrible, no good, very bad day that you gave me yesterday? I know there’s something about you won’t give me more than I can handle so can I catch a break here cuz I’m pretty sure this is borderline more than I can handle. Pretty please?” Still nothing. Cried out for GI Joe to come fix it, which he did in about 2 minutes flat. Apparently when I was playing Electrician and messing around in that breaker box thing I didn’t flip one of the switches back, ironically the one to the coffeemaker. He made me a cup of coffee, 3 sweeteners, lots of Cinnamon Bun creamer, delivered it to me in a pretty mug and all was well in the world again.

Thus concludes my horrible, no good, very bad day. The moral of the story here is electricity and coffee...they make the world go 'round. The end.