Crazy Crazy Week

Sorry about the silence on the blog lately.  We’ve had kind of a disastrous week.  We live in the Pacific Northwest and were hit with a significant storm last Thursday.  Winds peaked at 69 miles per hour at our house and we lost a couple sections of fence.  Not a big deal.

With the storm came the chaos that you might expect.  Over 1 million people were without power and nearly 5 days later, there are still a couple hundred thousand that don’t have it.  We lost power for about 21 hours so we were lucky.  We didn’t sweat it though because we have a generator system tied in to the house so we had a furnace, lights and the fridges were cold.  We even powered my next door neighbor’s furnace and fridges.

So, we came out of the storm pretty well.  My parents, on the other hand, had disaster strike in the form of fire.  At 1:00 on Sunday my mom called crying saying, “Our house is on fire!!!!”.  I dropped everything and made the normally 25 minute trip in about 15 minutes.  The fire was still going strong by the time I got there and there were 5 fire trucks on the scene.  The garage and shop  (very large) were a complete loss.  3 Fiat convertibles of my dad’s, his new boat that he’s never even driven, and his forklift were all inside and completely destroyed.  I won’t mention all the tools that he had.  He even lost his tractor that he made completely from scratch when he was younger.  I guess there was some good news in all of this.  The house (attached to the shop) didn’t burn down.  It sustained some pretty significant smoke damage and they took a little fire right where the steps come in to the kitchen, but I’ve been told it’s fixable.  The main thing is that both my parents are okay.  That’s really all I care about.  We have set them up in the guest room at my sisters while they figure out where they will stay while it’s rebuilt.  Luckily they had insurance on everything so hopefully it will all be rebuilt.

Anyway.  That’s my excuse for not blogging much over the past week or so.  As you can imagine, there are all kinds of financial angles to this situation, which I’ll surely blog about as they happen.  I hope everyone has a great Christmas, or whatever holiday you celebrate!