The power went out around 7:20am on Saturday here in Rockville after there was already close to two feet of snow on the ground.

Two neighbors and I shoveled out all the walks for the six houses in our row of townhomes. This provided Sookie a nice labyrinth to run through but also access between each neighbors home.

We took advantage of that by visiting the one neighbor who had a Coleman cooking stove. He invited us over for coffee and a small party formed at his place. Following another round of shoveling and dog walking, everyone reconvened at our place since we were all set up to host a party.

No one who came by seemed too concerned about the lack of heat or impending darkness, but none of these neighbors have small children. One couple, a few homes over do have a newborn in the house and for them this was a totally different day.

That neighbor was the first one out shoveling. He spent the day not only shoveling out the walk and the SUV but also the road too in hopes to get out of the neighborhood. They were either ill-prepared or adamantly opposed (or probably both) to having the new baby having to spend the night in the dark cold house. There was no sign of power returning before nightfall.

At one point we came together as a community, all working together with shovels and manpower to push out his SUV when he drifted into a snow bank only a few feet from the tire tracks that he could drive on to get out to the main road to get to somewhere with heat and power.

That really put things in perspective for me.

1. We need to add camping equipment to our baby registry so we can still have hot water even during a blackout and
2. That a fun adventure and a scary predicament are only separated by the condition of the people depending on you.

Fortunately for the Robleto family, baby is still the womb, Selena is healthy and Sookie loves the snow. So we were fine. After everyone left our little open house, Selena and I played the board games Agricola and Killer Bunnies by candlelight. Finally, about 15 hours later, when we were getting ready for bed, the power came back on.

Here are some photos from the Snowpacalypse:

Two feet of snow on the back porch

Neighbors (and Mr. A) weathering the storm at our place

Selena playing Killer Bunnies by candlelight

I never gave it much thought, but I was told yesterday that a bell will ring a death knell or you can put the final nail in a coffin, but there is no such thing as a death-nail. I appreciate the correction to my tweet:

We have lost power. I think that’s the death-nail in the Open House. We’ll try to postpone it to a less snowpocalyptic day.

On our wedding day, we had cupcakes for the guests and a small 6″ topper cake for the traditional cake cutting. When it came time to cut the cake, the knife wouldn’t go down. At first we thought it was a joke. We tried two different knives, we sawed at it, I had turned the knife over at one point and applied a stabbing motion to the cake. All to no avail. Our friends and family looked on, even after we fed each other cupcakes on the cuff instead, until I finally had to shoo them away. Apparently, it was frozen solid, since we had gotten the cake earlier.

We never waited to have it when it was defrosted, as we left for our honeymoon. And although Greg’s dad was nice enough to save it and send it back for our one year anniversary, it had only gotten even more inedible in that time.

So for part of Greg’s Fool’s Errand we decided to stop in at our reception site to see the owners of the resort and finally eat our cake which we ordered a replica of.

It was a completely different experience than on the day of. We were surrounded by Paul and their four kids, an artist we were meeting there that day, her mother, a newly rescued iguana, a confused Sookie, and all of the children’s pet chickens. Greg thought of it as symbolic of a new chapter in our lives. I loved that we finally ate our cake, which turned out to be really damn good. And the chicken insisted on the first slice. A video is available here.

Before the race

Having just found my camera over the weekend, I can finally post up photos from my run with my friend Kim and her son Timmy in November. We were supporting our old high school’s journalism program, which was just “the thing” everybody did back in those Rockville High School days. Because our paper was one of the top three high school papers in the state for over 13 consecutive years, everyone tried to take advantage of the program. My brother and my stepsister are both alumni of the program as well. I still apply what I had learned on a daily basis. That was where I first learned Aldus Pagemaker, the former industry standard of my current profession.

This race was meaningful to me on many levels. First were the obvious ties to the organization. Second, it felt good accomplishing it while pregnant. And third, I got a feel for what future races might be like by helping push Timmy along in the jogging stroller. I’m so glad that Kim and Timmy came out, despite our group slowly getting smaller (my brother was called into work and Greg contracted the flu the day before.)

(WARNING: Gross material ahead. May not be suitable for all audiences.)

The story, as Greg relayed it to me went something like this:

Surrounded by walls of snow double the height of her, we cleared a small area on the porch where Sookie’s training pads are for her to use the bathroom. On Sunday morning, after finishing her business, Greg grabbed some toilet paper to bring it in and flush it down the toilet. (Our poop receptacle and pooper scoop were long buried at this point. Plus, it was more eco-friendly.)

Unfortunately, with all the water tracked in and out near the door, Greg lost his footing as he came in, skidding across the hardwood and sending poop flying into the air for a brief moment before it fell back down and landed neatly on three different levels of our leaning bookshelves next to some small decorative items, as if that was where it was meant to be.

I lament that I only got to hear this secondhand; I was asleep through all this. However, my vision of what this cartoon-like scenario must have looked like in my head is probably better for it.