Storms that Change

So, it's been a while since I've updated this but I really have a good reason. With all the crazy weather around we had a storm that cut our power about 9pm Friday night, 1.5 hrs later (after the candle hunt) it came back on, by this time the trees had ice already encasing the branches, it was a beautiful sight! So we finished watching our movie (2 min left) and put on a second while playing Skip-Bo, it went off for good. A large branch overhanging our house from our pine tree fell (hit but no damage that we can tell) so we decided for safety to sleep on the living room floor. After a makeshift bed was formed and we finally got comfortable and used to the sound of trees snapping and transformers blowing Mike sat up and said, "we need to leave" so we packed up at 3am and went to our friends house.
The next 4 days were a lot of fun. We have some very gracious friends (Casey and Tiffany) who not only earned themselves gold kingdoms in heaven but I think they have enough left over for a couple of gold thrones here on earth. At times they had 15 people during the day (only Mike, Izzy and I had to spend the night every time) but it was like a giant adult party all weekend. We all had so much fun talking, cooking and just enjoying the time to catch up and solves our problems and the rest of the worlds as well!
Daily we went and checked out power and Sunday is when we saw the pictures that are shown here, beautiful yard/driveway we have! I think we had a total of 16 branches fall with another snow storm expected this weekend, we may get to increase that number....Hey at least thinning the tree isn't as pressing of an issue, at this rate we may not have to pay someone to do it at all, we'll let nature take it's course!
Monday night we left and headed over to another friends for the day to get out of Casey and Tiff's hair and let them have a night as a family, we returned in time to watch 24 with them!
All in all it was a great time. The power returned about 1:30 on Tuesday afternoon and we really settled in at 10 that night. Some other friends have had us over every night this week for dinner or movies. We are so blessed to have so many wonderful friends who are so kind and fun to be around. We would have froze to death other wise (our house got down to 42 degrees). We only hope that one day we can return the kindness shown to us, whether to them or to other individuals.
It's too bad we can't all get together more often that way, but trying to clear schedules is impossible , unless we have this outside help again!