Lights out
/Friday we got a load of snow. Throughout the night on Friday and well into the day Saturday the temps continued to drop and we had a freezing rain coating everything in a beautiful glistening layer of ice. The downside to this shiny layer was hundreds of thousands of Virginian’s without power for over 24 hours, starting at 11:30 on Saturday morning. The campus has huge backup generators but during the power surge a part was fried, so the maintenance team was scrambling the whole day to track down the part needed. The part was located and installed, but once that was in place several other damaged areas were found that would make staying in the quads over night unsafe, like the fire suppression system. The quads grew colder as the day wore on, but we occupied ourselves playing games, marveling at the ice covered trees, napping and attending a birthday gathering in a quad across campus. We received the unexpected word at dinner on Saturday evening that we were to head back to our quads and pack 2 days worth of stuff and wait to be called to a bus that would take us to a hotel off campus (the downed fire suppression system is why we were not given the option to just tough out the cold in our quads overnight). We’ve been bending over backwards (everyone involved with this training!) to keep this campus free from Covid. We’ve successfully created a Covid free bubble, so leaving campus obviously has now potentially exposed the lot of us (over 200 people) to Covid. Please pray with us that the Lord sustains our health and that leaving campus doesn’t turn us into a “super spreader” location. And praise the Lord for the staff here that scrambled all afternoon to find well over a hundred last minute hotel rooms to accommodate everything from our family (largest family here) to singles, at the same time this area was experiencing a huge influx of electrical workers coming to address the power outages. The staff here really are the cream of the crop, and we are continuously in awe of the logistical skills they have!
We’ve chuckled many times over the past couple of days that the singles and married couples without kids had a very different experience during this time off campus than the rest of us did. Either way, it was an adventure for all, and we were delighted to have the chance to order in and eat Five Guys! The boys are well versed in last minute adventure and packing up quickly, so they really did an excellent job at being flexible. We were relieved to be cleared to return to campus on Sunday afternoon, where we were greeted with sweet little Valentine’s gifts made by one of our director’s wives, and served a delicious Valentines dinner of filet mignon, fries and asparagus (cooked to perfection!) and were able to enjoy some board games with the boys and a couple games for just us two before settling in for the night. Josh stomped me in “greed”, thus the pouty face pic at the bottom. We are settled back into our weekly routine this morning. I drew up a couple pictures on my iPad to describe the weekend to my sister, over text. They can be seen below.
