Without Power; With Friends.

About Wednesday of last week the town was a buzz with talk of a coming ice storm.

"It's supposed to be worse than the Christmas Eve storm!" someone said.

"Did you hear that they've cancelled school tomorrow in anticipation?" another countered.

"But it's nearly seventy degrees out!" a third chimed in.

Indeed, it all seemed a little rash, but when you're in Oklahoma, this kind of cold weather storm is sort of a big deal. They don't happen every day, and when they do, the town is left scrambling to salt the roads, plow the streets, and make all the preparations that are second nature in northern cities that experience this sort of thing multiple times every winter.

Thursday arrived and it didn't look quite so bad. Still, Justin was sent home around 11 am from class. Things began to pick up that afternoon; first wind and rain, and then the ice began to form. The wind blew so hard as to make the icicles form at an angle!

We had a couple of flickers in our power, but didn't think much of it...until at 4:45 when the lights went out and didn't come back on.

After a few minutes we looked up the number for the power company and called to report the outage and get an estimate on how long we could expect to wait before the power would be restored.

"I can't give you an accurate estimate at this time. Power should be restored by 11 am on Monday, but it could be sooner."

Monday was a bad answer. Without a working fireplace, four days was way too long to be in an unheated home with an 18 month old. Thankfully, K&J still had power and welcomed us into their home because every hotel we called in Lawton was already full to the brim.

Our stay included Wii golf, bowling, and The Price is Right, Syfy's Alice, a very competitive game of Scrabble, delicious cookies (and other food), hot coffee, a comfortable air mattress, and of course, a visit with good friends. When Justin and Kellen went to check on the status of our power Friday morning they discovered that it had been restored. We stayed another night with K&J anyway. It was that much fun.

After more than four years of growing friendship, I honestly don't know what I'm going to do when we go our separate ways in a few months. Trying to soak up every minute...

Falling down on the job.

I write this blog for several reasons. For one, I like to write, and I don't get to do it very often since college. I also know it's a way to keep the people we care about updated on news and events in our lives when it would be very difficult to share photos and stories otherwise. It's a small way for me to try and reach out to like minded people on topics like motherhood and crafting. And finally it's just a great place for me to reflect and share what I'm feeling and thinking. I find that writing things down often helps me recognize patterns and identify things that I like or don't like and want to change.

In terms of news sharing, then, I've definitely fallen down on the job. Two weeks ago Justin submitted our preferences for his next duty station. I think there were something like 39 people vying for the available positions that had been given by list in advance. The Order of Merit for who had the opportunity to select first was based on number of months deployed and dwell time (number of months at home since your last deployment). Thankfully, Justin's purple heart was factored in by including the months he would have completed from his first deployment and we were somewhere near the top of the OML with 23 months deployed and 9 months of dwell time since his last deployment.

Given the available slots, we had ranked our preferences something like this:

1. Fort Lewis (near Tacoma in WA)

2. Fort Carson (Colorado Springs, CO)

3. Fort Stewart (closest to Savannah, GA)

4. Fort Campbell (Clarksville, TN)

5. Fort Riley (closest to Topeka, KS)

We'd hoped to get one of our top three. On the day Justin was to submit his request, he called me, minutes before his meeting with the Branch Rep. He'd heard some information that made him seriously question ranking Lewis as number one. We decided quickly to swap Carson to our first choice, and then the waiting began.

We had anticipated at least two weeks of wait time, so we were surprised and thrilled last week when he got word of his assignment to one of the three available slots at Fort Carson, CO.

From everything I've heard (and from what I remember as a child--we took two vacations to the Springs growing up), Colorado Springs is absolutely lovely and should make a wonderful home for us in the coming years. We are very excited and I've already begun to research (of course) about the area.

I pray that when we make our move in a few months that we will have a smooth transition, find opportunities for our growth, make new friends, and have a new place to call home.

In which I nearly punch a woman in the face.

We live less than 10 minutes away from the drive thru Starbucks in town. I'm not going to say that's why we picked our place, but it certainly didn't hurt. Today while I was out I needed to pick up some more coffee beans and swung by Starbucks on my way home.

I chose a pound of the Pike Place Roast and got in line. The woman in line in front of me glanced over her shoulder at me and gave a quick forced grin. Her eyes rested on my bag of coffee beans for a moment as the guy behind the counter reached for it and asked if I'd like it ground.

"Sure," I replied.

The woman looked back at me and asked, "Was that from over here? How much is that?"

Thinking that she was considering some for herself, I replied, quite helpfully, "Yes, just there. I think it's $9.95?"

"Ah," she said with a knowing smirk and a raised eyebrow. Next she looked at me and said, pointedly, more like a statement than a question, "Is your husband in the military?"

Now I'd lost my footing a little. Relevance?

"Ummm...Yes?"

"Well, then, you should know that you can get that in the commissary for $5.95. AND last week they had a coupon for a dollar off," she snapped, again with the little knowing smirk.

"........." I said.

".....well, that's good to know," I finished, as I listened to the guy grinding my beans. That would have been great to know before the guy took them to be ground, I thought.

And then she gives me a little laugh and another self-satisfied, condescending little gesture, and places her order for a grande Pike Place Roast, after clarifying to a different barista that NO, the ground bag of Pike Place was NOT part of her order, as if she could be that foolish.

Okay, just a few things here. One, I totally need to not let myself get worked up about this sort of thing, but I do.

Two, I was polite, but what I should have said was, "Gee, first of all, that's none of your business. Secondly, I live not far from here, so the time (40 minutes to get there and back with no traffic) and gas (16 miles round trip) it takes to go on post just doesn't seem to make the savings worth it to me. And even if I did want to save $4, I'd do just about anything to avoid going on post and having to talk to know-it-all busy bodies like YOU."

Point number three: If she was really interested in saving on her coffee, maybe she'd like to know that her little brewed cup of coffee cost her about 6 times (something like $.31 vs. $1.95) what it does to brew a cup at home. So if she buys a cup even three times a month, guess what? Her little commissary savings tip didn't make such a difference.