If this keeps happening, we'll be eating each other in no time.

Monday morning, I woke up because something changed in my bedroom. The fan had stopped working and by that constant buzzing suddenly dying, it woke me up. As I stared up at the ceiling, I heard thunder and realized that there was a storm. No big deal, I told myself. Thunderstorms don't bother me and I usually sleep through them. In fact, it had not been the loud thunder that awoke me but the change in the room itself. I rolled over and decided to go back to bed, weighing in my head the pros and cons of getting up to go to the bathroom.

Suddenly, there was a knock on my door. "Jess, do you have the lighter," my mom was asking on the other side of the locked door. I did have the lighter in my room as I had lit a couple of candles in there just days before in an attempt to help get rid of the smell of musty books that had only recently been unpacked after months in a storage shed. I told her I did and so I ended up rolling out of bed and throwing on some pants. I handed her the lighter and went to the bathroom. When I got out, I went back into my bedroom when we heard a crash. My mom asked if it was me and I told her it was not. Immediately, we headed into her room, where the noise had seemed to come from.

Looking out the window, we saw that one of our trees had fallen in our backyard and had only missed the house by a couple of feet. Luckily, it had fallen to the southeast; if it had fallen directly to the east, it would have landed on top of our back porch which my dad had only just remodeled. It was then that we both noticed the wind - the trees in the back yard were swaying to and fro as if blades of grass. I'd seen strong winds before, but nothing quite like this. It was time to head to the basement.

As we ran downstairs, the phone rang. Thinking it might be my dad, who had stayed over night at the hospital to have a sleep study performed on him, my mom ran to answer it.

It was Grandma.

She decided she wanted to tell my mom everything that was going on, but my abruptly ended the conversation, stating we were going to the basement. We went down there and watched the storm through the windows. An hour passed and everything finally began to die down. We noticed that the sky to the north was green and eerie. We emerged from the basement to find that a tree had fallen across our road, blocking us and our neighbors in. A couple of the neighbors grabbed their chainsaws and began clearing it.

I went back to bed.

As we began hearing about more of the damage throughout the day, we realized it might be awhile before we had power restored to us. My mom went and bought ice for the freezers and refrigerators. Luckily, the town of Aledo was unaffected and had plenty of ice. By stocking up on ice in both fridges, we saved all of the food until we managed to get a generator early this morning. Power was finally restored about 9:00 tonight, some 39 hours later.

In that 39 hours, I managed to read about 200 pages in the book I'm reading, "Elantris" by Brandon Sanderson. Kristin came over and we played Scrabble (I won!) and Mall Madness (she won!). I sat around on the back porch a lot and talked to my parents. Mom actually admitted to wanting to get a dog and an invisible fence and put the blame squarely on my dad as being the anti-dog person in the family. I might be able to use this against him. Also, I managed to talk to some of the neighbors more than I have in years. A whole ten minutes worth. Oh, and my cell phone was shut off because this current bout of unemployment means I didn't pay the bill this month (I used my last check from the Putnam to pay it last month).

All in all, it was an interesting two days. And, I've got to admit, I kind of enjoyed living on cold cuts from the cooler and bottled water (the generator on the well went down for about five hours yesterday).

What I do know is: when the revolution hits (or it could be the Apocalypse), you city-folk are screwed. I've heard the stories of long lines of intensely angry people at the gas stations or confused individuals standing around dumbfounded by the carnage. My advice: get out, now, while you can. Get some land, buy a generator, stock up on gas, grab some rifles, grow a garden, and build a fruit shelter/emergency bunker. 2012 is coming. Don't be caught off guard.