elfs | Jan. 7th, 2004

I spent all night under the covers, under four blankets, shivering madly. I was freezing all night despite the covers, unable to keep any body heat in. At the worst, my temperature spiked to 102.4-- at least, that's the highest reading I saw, goddess only knows how high it really went. I could get out of bed only for a few minutes at a time, and then I would have to crawl back into my life-support pod to warm back up. I wandered in and out of consciousness, feeling a vague nausea that never manifested as anything else.

At three the power went out. Kouryou-chan and I snuggled further under the covers. The house started to get very, very cold. All through the night I heard thumping and cracking sounds as big cakes of snow and ice slid off the roof. At one point I heard a very loud CRACK-FWOOMPH! sound.

When I woke up, I was able to stay conscious long enough to discover that schools were still closed, this time because of power outages. The power was still down in the house, and the temperature dropped to 65. I felt miserable. There was a vice about my head, twisting tighter and tighter, and my mouth was horribly dry.

About ten I figured out what was wrong with me. Part of the headache was due to a lack of caffeine but most of it was dehydration. I spent the next hour with three penguins, two aspirin, a liter of water, and a liter of pedialyte and felt much better. By now it was almost lunchtime, and I was so grateful to

shaterri for keeping Kouryou-chan out of trouble while I tried to recover. My temperature is almost down to normal, I'm awake and functional and (as you can guess) the power came back on at 5:45. The house is up to 61F (it was down to 57F at one point).

The car is frozen solid. I can't get the doors open, and I'm not even going to try the defroster after reading

j5nn5r's post about his own car windows. Plus, Shaterri informs me that there are downed powerlines on the road leading out of our cul-de-sac, which he expects aren't powered but he wouldn't bet on it. Great.

The loud cracking sound, it turns out, was a tree from our neighbor's yard. A branch high up gave way, snapping under the weight of so much ice and came down, bringing a whole bunch of other branches with it, right on top of our outdoor storage shed and part of the fence. The fence seems to be intact and the shed, well, if it's wrecked I won't care that much; it needed to be replaced anyway.