I rolled up on Tuesday to find this in our driveway.

Here’s our neighbor standing on the down live oak branch for scale. We’re still not exactly sure what caused it to break and fall; no storms or particularly notable winds were happening around the time it fell.

Since we rent a charming old house it turns out said charming old house isn’t up to code with external wiring. Before the energy company can hook up power again our landlord had to hire an electrician to rewire the place, replace the meter and then get the city to inspect it. This is all underway as we speak.

Our neighbors beyond-kindly ran a heavy-duty extension cord to run our refrigerator and chest freezer and once I knew the entire contents of the fridge didn’t need to be cooked, canned (which I could still actually do!) or parceled out to neighbors’ fridges/freezers I began to look at our situation with a bit more humor. I hung the load of laundry in the washing machine (thankfully a finished load) out on the line and we fired up the grill outdoors and cooked up dinner as planned using the burner within the grill to boil quinoa. Since it’s actually more difficult to stay elsewhere during these busy times for our family, we’re luxuriously roughing it, aka camping in our house, with (cold) running water and a gas stove we realized after the grill dinner that we can manually light. We don headlamps and giggle at each others’ light trails and how we’re lurking around the house like spelunkers.

I know this is nothing compared to those who suffer real tragedies, like victims of recent hurricanes or tornadoes, and I’m so thankful that no one was parked in our driveway at the time. It’s encouraging that beyond a little hot and humid grumpiness, life is resuming without too much drama. 

Hell we’re even still grinding our coffee beans thanks to a giveaway pile gift from Annia via Zora, which helps to seriously undermine grumpiness.