December 27, 2012

I sure hope everyone had a joyous Christmas!  We had a white one! Yes, it snowed! We woke to rain -- wonderful rain.  Then around lunch time it turned to snow. Only a couple of inches. But Cold oh, man it's cold! Right now I am sitting -- blissfully I might add --  on a very cold morning with a hot cup of coffee and a quilt in my lap hand quilting.  Five dresden blocks done!  Only eleven more to go and the sashing and outer borders but who's counting? LOL  I am TRYING to learn to use a thimble.  Some may think it odd that I never learned to use one in my younger years.  I just never did.  This morning I have been watching YouTube videos of hand quilting and I will be practicing what I have learned.  Wish me luck!

We had our children and grandchildren for Christmas Dec. 23.  It's always nice to have a full house again if only for a little while.  We enjoyed one of our hams from a Hampshire/Berkshire cross we had raised. It was EXCELLENT! 

It has been a week or so!  Recap-- on  Dec. 19  we had our Kraz-z Quilters Christmas party. It was fun and then things went down from there.  Temps were warm and humid that day--70s.  That night around 10pm there was a cold front blew in.  Blew would be a mild word. 

The winds gusted big time.  One of the big wind gusts blew a large limb out of the tree by our back porch.  It fell onto our electric service line pulling the service meter almost off the pole. It caused a small grass fire! We had to crawl through the big limb's branches to get out to the water faucet and garden hose.  We got that out pretty quickly. Things happened that caused us to have a power surge go through our house! Like the electric company personnel told us -- we had 220 going through our 110 outlets.  Not good!  We saw sparks coming out of some of the outlets initially.  Thank God it didn't burn our house down.  Hog Man being the smart man he is--flipped all the breakers off.  He made a quick call to the electric company to get them to come turn off our electricity. LOL Not many people WANT their electricity turned off.  With the wind gusts and the service hanging on the pole the electricity kept arcing when the wind blew hard. And each time the sparks flew I would pray that there would not be any more fire. Somehow or another our problem was relayed from dispatcher to serviceman that we were out of electricity. When the repair person drove by they saw we had our security light on and thought our electricity had come back on. They didn't call to check probably thinking since the house was dark we had gone to bed.  The security light is on the other side of the service meter.  Long story short--we spent the night without electricity, a huge limb on a live line and up until 1am or so watching sparks fly.  Like Hog Man said--Thank God, my wife's a quilter--we wrapped up in quilts and stayed warm.

First thing the next morning Hog Man calls the electric company back and  a whole crew shows up in no time flat.  As the electricity came back on we immediately knew what was working and what wasn't.  Thank God our heating and a/c unit was okay.  The refrigerator, microwave, tv, stereo, clock radios, all gone.  Our freezers full of meat are okay!  Washer and dryer are okay! We had a big surge protector on the computer, printer, and internet and they are okay--big surge protector is toast.  We have four or five holes in the roof.  And lots of limbs and sticks to pick up after the large limb was moved.  When it happened Hog Man was watching the nightly news and I was sewing at the dining room table.  I was working on a fabric basket on my Kenmore sewing machine.  It was not affected at all. Praise the Lord.

Insurance man came the same day.  We will have a check soon.  To say the least 2012 has been a challenging year.  And thank God He not only walked it with us but protected us all along the way. 

We are counting our blessings here at this house.  May you and yours be blessed.

From the Catering Quilter