Was it just one week ago that I said I LOVED snow days? Said they brought me peace and comfort? 
Well, I have one thing to say to last week’s post: 
was I thinking???!!!???
A week ago Wednesday night, almost every school district around me began announcing early dismissal for Thursday. Not my district. On Thursday morning, my girls left for school, my oldest drove and it didn’t look too bad out. Mid-morning Thursday, the 
was coming down like crazy and I called school (which still hadn’t closed) and dismissed my daughter before the roads got worse. Thursday night, again every school district around me announced they’d be closed for Friday. Not my district. At 2:00 AM, I woke to the power going on and off, on and off until it finally settled on … you guessed it, OFF. Not really processing what this meant, we went back to sleep. At 6:00 AM, the battery in my alarm clock made it go off and I didn’t know what the noise was. I couldn’t see very well because it was still dark and we had no power. Some stumbling around and finally my husband did something to make the noise stop. That’s when we realized it was COLD. :snowguy: As in, no electricity means NO HEAT! 
We looked outside and realized we’d gotten slammed by snow and it was still coming down. We assumed they’d canceled school because we had no phone service to get the call. Thank goodness my husband was willing to venture out and Dunkin Donuts was open. He brought us all home coffee and we met downstairs and lit a fire where the four of us sat. And stared – at the fire, at each other, and at the dogs. Oh. And we shivered. I called from my cell and reported the outage, but there was no information on how long we’d be without power and heat. The dogs, needing comfort too, jumped on the couch and slammed into my husband and his coffee, spilling it all over. No more warm coffee for him!
A little while later, we got a call that the carbon monoxide detector was going off in my parent’s house, who are in Florida but have a house a mile away from us in NY. My husband called the Fire Dept. and met them over there, where everything was fine. While he was gone, youngest daughter and I played scrabble in front of the fire. Oldest slept. Suddenly our carbon monoxide detector (which is connected to our alarm system) went off. I called hubby and he said he’d bring firemen to our house. A few minutes later, they were trudging through our place and we discovered our detectors were about 13 years old and needed to be replaced. Took awhile to get them to stop beeping though. No carbon monoxide levels were detected and they left. Hubby went out again later and brought home lunch, which we ate while we froze.
Finally I called Con Ed back and found out they couldn’t estimate a recovery time because they had 40,000 customers out in our county alone. So we dropped the dogs off at the kennel (they had heat) and called a hotel and headed over there. From that point on, things were more comfortable, at least until the following morning when my husband woke us at 6 AM to take him back to the house for his car so he could go to work. (Note: He didn’t HAVE to go to work, he couldn’t lay around anymore! Grrrr) The day started early, we had breakfast, checked out, went to knitting store 
(I’m making a BLANKET!) By the time we headed home to check the house, it was a little after Noon. Nothing had changed. We decided to go back to the hotel where many of my friends and neighbors were and to knit in the lobby or a corner somewhere it was warm.
We pulled out of my street and immediately noticed a MPH sign was flashing with the speed limit. We even discussed “Oh wow it’s flashing” and NOBODY realized that meant in the two seconds since we’d left the house, the POWER CAME BACK ON! :duh: We drive all the way to the hotel (not far but not close close either), find our friends to hear them tell us the POWER CAME BACK ON! And then it clicked. We should have known from the flashing MPH sign! :duh: :duh:
You’d think that’s the end, right?
WRONG!
We have two zones of heat and only one kicked back in. The downstairs still had no heat! Suffice it to say, we are now, finally back to normal. As for me? The next time I hear snow, I think the fear of GOD is going to kick in and I’ll go into hiding.
Lastly, I have to thank my oldest for being a good sport and allowing me to post these embarrassing photos here today!
Certainly tops a “Never Travel With Carly” story, doesn’t it?
:snowguy:
Carly Phillips would like to take 100% credit for all her stories but the truth is, Carly’s strength is writing family, emotion, funky elderly people and animals. She couldn’t plot her way out of a paper bag, which is why she smartly found her plotmonkey pals early on in her writing career. Thanks to their support, Carly is now a NYT Bestselling author of 23 plus novels. Because writing doesn’t keep her busy enough, Carly is also a wife, a mother of one preteen and one teenage daughter, the primary care giver of her soft coated Wheaten terrier and an expert carpool mom.
3 Seductions and a Wedding
COLD SIGHT
Kiss Me If You Can
Wild For Him
Subscribe to Posts 
Comment
Yikes! I don’t know what I’d do without heat. But it sounds like a comedy of errors with you guys. Glad everyone is safe and sound, and that power is being restored. Hugs to you all!
I’m just waiting for all this dang snow to finally melt!
Comment
Poor Carly! The story may not be a never travel with Carly one, but it is just as entertaining. I think the writer has something to do with that. You had quite an adventure this past week…LOL!!! Gosh, I remember those days without heat. Sleeping in outside coats and huddled together on the bed…some of the worst, scary times of my life. Being from Jamaica, that was a rude awakening for me. The sun is shining today, so that is a big bonus for us up here in NE CT.
Well, you did get the family time you wanted, lots of fodder for “research” and you got to go on adventures. Woo, I can see it now…but, alas, only you could weave a tell with more emotion than I with these details.
Your eldest is a great sport for letting you post pics. I would have died! Have a wonderful day every. I will check back later Carly!
Peace and love,
Paula R.
Comment
oh my gosh. Sorry about the no hear. On the flip side, you did go and stay in a hotel so maybe that could qualify as the top Carly traveling tale (or do you have to go on a plane) Glad things are back to normal and now you know exactly what you can use the blanket that you are knitting can be used for next winter. I think you need a group
Hoping the snow melts soon and you see the spring flowers.
Comment
Hi Carly!
Up by me, 150,000 people lost power. I was one of them. My children had a half day of school on Tues. then were off Wed., Thurs., and Fri. (With Friday they exceeded their snowdays for the year and now have a shortened Easter vacation.) We lost power from Thursday night to Saturday afternoon. My oldest daughter stayed with a friend who had power…lucky right? Except a huge ice-covered tree limb fell on to her car, shattering the windshield and denting the hood. Luckily she wasn’t in it at the time. I don’t want to sound old, but children today do not know how to occupy themselves after their cell phone batteries die and with no access to Facebook and Xbox. When we could no longer take the whining, my husband took my daughter to a friend who lives three minutes away who had power. (No fair!) Anyway, we stuck it out and made it through. And now I am SO READY FOR SPRING!!
Comment
Cher
Comment
Carly, I absolutely love your stories. I’m in NJ so I know about the snow. I didn’t mind it either as long as I didn’t have to go out in it. We rarely lose our power and we did about 9:30 one night. So we thought the best thing to do was go to bed. Well your mind plays games and we starting thinking it was really cold and we only lost it for an hour. But during that hour I’m thinking should I pack the food in a cooler, should we go to a relative’s house or a hotel? I feel for you!
Comment
Carly…I imagine there is a great story to be written in there. I am sorry I laughed. I am remembering last year with the ‘great snow storm” in the PNW. We didn’t lose power, but at 4 p.m. every evening, the boys would start circling the downstairs. We didn’t have a Wii or anything to keep them occupied, so for two weeks, it was miserable, especially for my oldest (with autism who routines are so important). He would ask me a million times, “is there school tomorrow, is there school tomorrow?” I literally hid in my room. I couldn’t bake (it was before Christmas and usually the boys help me bake), I couldn’t do anything. Sounds like your February. Sorry
Comment
Sending you lots of hugs :)
Comment
Wow! That’s why I live in the deep South. It’s sunny and 60 here. I am sorry it’s been so rough for you. Hope things warm up soon.
Comment
But you have tornadoes and stuff like that- at the end of winter, my house is still standing!!
Comment
We’ve been lucky in the PNW this year but not so last year. We lost our power 6 times. We had an extra week of Christmas vacation before vacation because we had 24 inches of snow one week & 12 more the next. They don’t have snow plows out here and we were never plowed out. Our main road never got plowed until Dec. 26th. Christmas Eve I was cooking spaghetti on the wood stove. We drank a lot of wine that night. Luckily my family are readers so we were entertained. I had invested in about 8 camping lights & book lights.
I was trying to figure out how to cook a ham on the wood stove when the lights went on at 9AM Christmas day. Half of our presents didn’t make it for 10 days. We didn’t get mail for 2 weeks & UPS for 10 days. I was really glad for Christmas to be over. I was tired of lugging in wood, but our stoves were great.
We didn’t have a snow day this year & I was very happy about that.
Comment
Wasn’t that snowstorm the WORST? I still have nightmares from it!
Comment
I remember an ice storm we had several years ago. We were without electricity for two weeks. Luckily, we have a gas stove, and four rooms have gas wall heaters. We stayed warm and the BIL loaned us a generator to keep the fridge going. Nights were by battery lantern or candle light. We didn’t eat out because I needed to cook what was in the freezer, just in case. We are surrounded by trees and hearing a branch crack and fall in the middle of the night was like waking up to gun fire.
When the electrical workers hit our block, I was taking them coffee and cookies like you wouldn’t believe! Should I mention that we were the first house on the block with power?
Happy March! :Irish1:
Comment
Yes Carly you did get what you wished for and I don’t see you wishing for that again. Sounds like you had a mini vacation and it was very interesting with all the different things you guys tried and look you got to see neighbors you probably haven’t seen in a while.
It gave me a good laugh and it sounds like things happen to you that happen to me and my cousin when we are together. I still think it would be a blast to travel with you and see what kind of trouble we could get into unless we were arressted or something like that. LOL
Comment
That sounds like quite the snow storm adventure. I hate being cold. :snowguy: I have dealt with power outages, lack of water but not the snow! Glad I live where I do, no snow.
Thanks for sharing your experience with us. 
Just remember that old saying “Beware what you wish for”. 
Comment
Like someone else said, sorry I laughed but…that’s pretty funny. The best part to me was the part about it snowing really hard and they hadn’t canceled school yet. THAT’S the difference between living in NY and NC!
We woke up to the phone ringing at 5:45 yesterday morning to tell us school was cancelled. I looked outside and there wasn’t even an 1″ of snow on the ground. But it was a wet, slushy snow and from what I understand the roads were bad. But they were clear by 10:00.
Now, the kids have to go to school on Memorial Day to make the day up. They were supposed to be out tomorrow but have to go as a make-up day for a day they missed in February.
They’ve had to make-up days missed for hurricanes before, but not for snow days that I can remember. And I’m more than ready – like really, really more than ready – for warm weather to get here and stay!!
Comment
So sorry you had a bad experience with your snow days, Carly. We only lost power once(that I can remember) due to ice/snow. It was the year after I graduated from college and we had a really warm day and the the temps dropped over night and we had an ice storm. I was living at my dad’s and we woke up to a huge branch falling on the house. Sounded like a cannon had gone off. We were lucky to be on the same power grid as the police and fire stations, so we only went without power for about 12 hours. Another bonus, we had a floor furnace so we never lost heat. However, the rest of the family did lose power and heat, so we ended up having an overly full house for the night.
Comment
Yep it was crazy! And you’re right, kids don’t know WHAT to do without electronics!
Comment
I live in Northern Michigan in the “snow belt”. So I understand about the snow. It’s not often we lose power in the winter, of course who knows what kind of wire they use here. The amount of snow and cruddy weather sucks big time. This winter hasn’t been as bad, but I could do without driving in blizzards frequently.
Comment
This is why I am glad we bought a big ole’ RV last fall. Although we are across from a nursing home and are seldom off for very long, I know that the dogs,cats and me (and maybe hubby) can survive in the RV- with heat, water, flusing toilet and tv!!
:Irish1: to Big Bertha (that’s the RV!)
Comment
Carly, you think you might have a story in all that??? That is one reason why I left NY-winter snow and coldddd. Can’t take it no more, gettin too old(although the TX heat is just as bad). You’re still a young whipper snapper. I hope you learned not to praise the SNOW GOD.
Comment
Wow, it’s in the 40’s and sunny for us this week in Michigan
But no fear we will still have our share of ice and snow I am sure. It’s 15 degrees F. this morning. We’ve lost the power and bundled up a couple of times too. Brrrrrrrrrrrr…
Comment
Karen…before I say anything else…you know I love you right???
well…all I could think as I was sitting here reading this was….OMFG…She’s seriously blond. ROLMFAO…..I hate stereotyping but I can’t help it….You about had me peeing my pants cause even I’d have noticed that meant that you must have power back on. LOL….it’s like one of those Chevy Chase movies….Vacation…anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Story of my life too….that snow you wanted so bad… sucked here too…we lost power…worst part was hubby was gone on a snowmobiling trip with his friend….we hadn’t had snow most all winter…very little..no plowing involved…he friggin leaves….and we got enough to choke a horse…and not only do I have to shovel my house…but then go to ex inlaws because he’s supposed to do them…but he’s gone….then I get sicker that a dog…powers out here too but it comes back on by night…I call his pals wife to bitch…and tell her…I didn’t want him to go anyway because every time he goes away from me…something happens to him….ie…broken ankle, broken leg, torn knee cap, dislocated shoulder so far……she laughs and says nothing will happen…so I email her hubby with mine and tell him…don’t let him do anything stupid cause he’ll get hurt….they laugh and email me back…two days later hubbys back….a truck dove onto snowmobile trail…they had to swerve to avoid it…friend made it…hubby was behind and flipped the snowmobile…dislocated his other shoulder and had to have two men help him slam it back in place…. Needless to say…they were afraid to tell me….and Needless to say He’s been banned from going away without me ever again….and all this because of that F@$^%@# 4 letter word…SNOW
Comment
oh…and thanks for the reminder to replace carbon monoxide detectors…mine are 12 years old…lol
Comment
TGIF! Sorry to hear about the loss of heat and I am waiting for the Spring weather to come!