Earthquakes & Hurricanes, OH MY! plus our other adventures

Note: I wrote this post about two weeks ago, but our internet has been super unreliable since the hurricane and the big storm we had right after that so it has been sitting in my box unpublished. The delay makes the time line very confusing but I had written to much to just discard it. So here is our story of crazy weather/living on the Earth here on the East coast.First there was the earthquake... I've never been in an earthquake before. It was possibly the most surreal event I have ever experienced. I was at work, on a conference call to Washington DC (learning about the new medicare rules... UGH) when the building started to shake. I looked at the ladies next to me and we all thought that it was the roofers on top of our building for a moment, then it dawned on us that it couldn't be. About 2 minutes later, the people in DC started to freak out... the earthquake had made its way up there. Nik was in a building at school that was built in 1850.... really not the place you want to be in during an earthquake. Raivis was at home, in bed, sleeping through it. Needless to say we are fine, nothing fell at our house, Nik's school was fine, and my work was fine. First natural disaster of the week survived.

Then Hurricane Irene blew into town. Another first for us, our first strong storm to make it to us in Richmond. By the time Irene got to us it was classified as a tropical storm but it still wrecked plenty of havoc. It hit here on Saturday. We settled in for the day... actually Raivis, Grandma Carol and I went on a Target run in the morning so that I could by a planter that was on clearance, then we settled in for the day. Mostly in was tons and tons and tons of rain with tons and tons and tons of wind. Nik and I decided we needed some ice cream that evening, so we got dressed and walked down to the store in the pouring rain. It was a lot of fun, the streets and the stairs that come down the hill were like rivers. The store had sealed off all of its frozen foods in case of the loss of power... so we settled on hurricane Oreos.Raivis dug hurricane Oreos.

We never lost power at our house, we were some of the lucky ones as 750,000 people lost power in Virginia alone. We did loose power at my work though, for 6 days! It was absolute exhausting craziness, especially because I work in a two story facility and the elevator does not work when the generator is running things AND it was made especially crazy when our generator went out. So we ran everybody's meals up the stairs for every meal, took very heavy patients down the stairs to leave for appointments, and had patients sleeping in the halls so that they could get oxygen from the plugs that the generator was powering when the generator was running. I have never been so happy for power. I decided that I didn't care what happened at work after that... we could get 40 new patients or loose 40 patients, the building could start falling down... whatever, as long as we had power. Some of my coworkers were out of power at their homes for a total of 10 days!!

Because of all of the craziness we haven't had internet reliably. So, Nik and I have had to go to a local bar to watch our Broncos win both games. It is always good to see our Broncos win but since the games always go so late here on the East coast, I'd rather cheer them on in my jammies. Luckily Grandma Carol doesn't mind keeping an ear on the boy while they sleep!

In other news, we finally made it up to the mountains on Labor Day! We drove up to Shenandoah National Park. I had done the research, planned our route, picked out a couple of short hikes that we could do AND forgot to check the weather. The leftovers of tropical storm Lee hit here that day so it was raining the whole time we were up there. Luckily it hadn't started raining super heavy yet. We drove for quite a while taking in what we could see of the beautiful scenery then stopped at one of the hikes that I had read about. After some debate we decided to go for it (even though I hadn't thought to be prepared with jackets), we could always turn around if we needed to. It turned out to be really great, the sounds in the forest were really cool in the rain and the trees kept us from getting drenched. We made it all of the way to the little waterfall at the end of the hike. Raivis did pretty good, he walked part of it and rode on Nik's back for a while. And guess what I found while we were up there? Evidence that fall is on its way!!

Raivis helps Daddy study Microbiology...

Other then that we have just been doing what we do.... Nik goes to school, I go to work, and Raivis has a blast with Grandma during the day. Pretty good stuff if you ask me.

Happy Fall Everybody!!