windstorms, earthquakes, & bonus sam time

well the last twenty-four hours have been nuts for us pacific northwestern-ers. a crazy windstorm last night & a random 4.2 magnitude earthquake at 8:00 this morning have completely upset our normal routine. didn't see that coming. i can't remember the last time i saw/heard/felt winds as strong as last night's {if ever} & our yard now looks like a war zone.

...that is, if lots of leaves, branches, & random debris were used in wars.

here are some pictures from around the area, but please note that none of these pictures are of my house/yard/road & i didn't take these pictures. they were all borrowed from here.

crazy right? we were pretty lucky though. we weren't really affected by the storm & we didn't even lose power even though most people around us did.

the lights were flickering a ton though, so i had sam get out a couple flashlights. of course he goes for the mag light & then proceeds to shine it in my eyes every chance he got saying dumb things like, "miss, how much have you been drinking tonight?" and thinking it was hilarious. i think i'll be seeing blobs of white behind my eyelids for days now. awesome.

and, after getting up & heading out to work like normal this morning, sam got to his office to find they were out of power too. so he got to come home for a couple hours until the power came back on. parker enjoyed having his dad to hang out with around the house this morning.

and i enjoyed it too. mostly because i got to take a nice medium long shower & not even use p-ray's nap time to do it. but also because it was nice having sam around.

i always get weird mixed emotions about natural disasters. it's totally exciting, & i'm always sad when life goes back to normal & life isn't all disrupted by it anymore. is that weird? but in the midst of it, i always kinda freak out too. like, if the power goes out at least we have internet through our phones. but what if our phones die? then i can charge them in the car. but then what if the gas runs out? well we can walk to the gas station a mile away. well what if they run out of gas because everyone else is stocking up??

yeah, it's weird. then i resolve to always keep my phone charged above 75%, keep my gas tank above half full, & keep lots of batteries handy for flashlights. then life goes back to normal & i forget. oops.