Hello, My Name is Pam and....

I'm getting ready to make a confession. One that has actually ostracized me from my friends and family this winter when my secret was let out of the bag. I am a true lover of the white powder...the cold, fluffy type of precip, that is. My incessant Facebook posts about the snow has alienated me from my friends. Truly, my FB friends have formed teams, mine is officially Team Pam but I like to refer to it as Team Big Snow. The enemy camp is Team LaDawn (a sweetheart cousin of mine). It's like Twilight Wars all over again. Even my sister joined Team LD, to which I commented it was like the Civil War all over again, sister against sister. Oh, me the fun you can have on Facebook. What? A time sucker? You must have it confused with Twitter.

Anyway, as I was saying I LOVE me some snow days. So you're thinking I love skiing or sledding with my kiddos or just getting outside and enjoying the frosty weather. Heck no! I try to stay indoors as much as possible, except for my hourly depth checks with the ruler. I do not enjoy frozen feet and fingers that can't bend. So you're wondering, why do I love snow? Well honestly, and I will be honest with you, there are a couple of reasons.

Reason numero uno, the big daddy of them all, is I get to sleep in and our routine goes out the window and disappears into a mountainous bank of snow. Actually I only sleep in on days where I know we are out of school (like 6 of the past 7 school days), otherwise I get up before the sun and watch the news until I see our school and then go back to bed--woo-hoo!!!

The second reason is my hubby is a maintenance man at his place of employment which requires him to help with snow removal. If there is snowfall, this usually equals a windfall of lots (and sometimes LOTS) of overtime. Which equals money we had not budgeted for, which means either getting ahead or being able to move something up on our 'to do' list.

Now for every wonderful thing in life there is always a downside as well, and that one has been completely obvious this weekend. Another big storm rolled in early Friday morning and by 5 p.m. we had lost our electricity and by 10 a.m. Saturday no phone (which equals no internet, which is the only reason I even care about the phone part). And here we are Monday evening at 9:30 p.m. and I still have neither. We can see the power trucks working in our neighborhood but so far...nada, nothing, zip. The first night was a novelty, the second mildly irritating, the third frustrating, and but by the afternoon I had hit DEF COM 4 people (5 = push the button, 4 = 'get out of mama's way, she means business'). (Now don't get me wrong, I sure do appreciate the hardworking power persons who have been working nonstop. Its currently 23.6 degrees and they are tramping through fields and forests trying to find trees or whatever has knocked us off the grid. Thank you Dominion Power line workers!)

But my sanity has been saved this afternoon by the fact that D broke down and purchased us a generator. We have debated this purchase many times before and so far it's always gotten the red light. However, three days with four kids will make you do crazy things...like use the above-mentioned OT for a generator instead of funding vacation or paying for college tuition or whatever. I don't care. I am currently typing on a fully-charged laptop, the girls are watching Nick, the boys are watching 24, and most importantly everybody can flush the toilet without me having to dump buckets of water in the back. Yes!

(update: It is 7:10 a.m. Tuesday, we still have no power but the phones are on and another nor'easter is bearing down upon us...bringing us possibly 10-15" of new powder.)

(UPDATED: We only got about 4" of the good stuff and the POWER IS BACK ON...somewhere between 10:30 p.m. and 2:30 a.m. Wednesday..I know this b/c I had to get up at 2:30 and make the hubs a pot of coffee...did I say I liked his OT?)