What to do when there's nothing to do: A survival guide for country folk without power, water, AC, road access and hope

Friends with Power,

I write to you with the sound of our backup generator sputtering mercifully in the background. Instead of using our alternate source of power for reasonable things like DVD watching and online poker playing, we are making sure our 2 deep freezers full of deer carcass and minestrone soup stay edible. It's a worthy cause I reckon. However, I'm melting. It neared 100 degrees yesterday which is why I was on my back on my living room floor flailing my arms and legs in a summer-time snow angel motion.

The thought of being without modern conveniences for an extended period of time is not savory, however, it's kind pioneerish which in my head puts me alongside one of my childhood idols, Laura Ingalls Wilder. Now the only difference between her and me is an electric toothbrush.

If you look closely in the background, you can see one of our horses, Patches, fa-la-te-de-da-ing and grazing on some nearby grass. Little did she know that in a few short minutes, she'd have an 100 lb. metal barn door careening towards her.  She jumped the fence like a champ and thus saved her hind end.

Hard to imagine that just hours earlier, the sky looked like this...

Yesterday morning, I took a 3 hour hike to assess the damage caused by this storm.  Along my route, I came across these fellows:

Cows are naturally afraid of everything under the sun so when I asked this guy if he was spooked from the storm, he answered "Duh, yeah."

Moving on to things that aren't quite as sassy, here we have Queen Anne's Lace (my favorite flower of all time).

On a side note, I will never understand the thought process behind someone rolling their crusty car down the ditch on someone else's property.  Or maybe I can.  It maybe sounds something like this: "Here you go! You don't want this but here you go!" 

But that car has nothing to do with the storm.  Me taking a picture of my fancy farm boots in the stream does.

The reason I was playing down at the stream was because I was meeting this guy on the four-wheeler.

Yours Truly had to sit through (seemingly) hours of the following:  "Amanda Kate, let it be known that your dad is a GENIUS!"  Of course he was referring to his funnel and hose contraption that he was using to collect water from the stream for bathing and toilet flushing.  I gave him kudos.  It was smart. I come by it honestly.

Finally on the way back, I found this old spare tire on the side of the road.  I also took some pictures of huge trees that had been uprooted but who wants to see that?  Random roadside trash is far more interesting. I hope you agree. 

*This post was written two weeks ago.  By now, you know better than to assume I'll be timely with my posts.  We have since gotten power, water and road access back after 10 days without.  You should know it was a precarious and smelly situation.