Post-Vacation in Jamaica - from Sunday December 22 to Friday December 27, 2013

Post-vacation in Jamaica - Sunday December 22, 2013:

Two nights after landing in Toronto, we still did not have power or heat and it was getting too cold to stay home any longer.  Finally, on Monday December 23, we booked ourselves into a local hotel, the Comfort Inn in Oshawa.  Kyle and Cathy took his two girls, Kaylee and Jaime, up to see their grandmother, Trudy, in Innisfil, Ontario for Christmas and Boxing Day.  Meanwhile, Dave and I had to stay in the Comfort Inn and keep booking more nights as we got news updates from the CP24 TV channel on the power outage situation.  For some unknown reason, our hotel was not affected by a power outage until Thursday December 26.  This is, by far, the longest and most severe power outage I have ever experienced! 

The last time I experienced a power outage (blackout) in the GTA was in 2004 or 2005 when I lived in the most eastern part of Scarborough and that time, it lasted about 22 hours.  But, that time was also different because it happened in the summer….we weren’t living in sub-zero temperatures at home then!  Our frozen food at that time had almost started to thaw, but thankfully, the power came back on before there was any irreversible loss. This time, however, we’ve lost all of our frozen food because you cannot re-freeze it once it starts thawing right out.  So now, it’s all garbage and we’ll have to start all over again shopping for meat and frozen food, etc. 

I really do hope that my home insurance will cover our frozen food losses and our hotel bills for this week.  I am still here, sleeping at the Comfort Inn for the fourth night this week!  Dave went back to our place tonight (Thursday) to check out the situation for the second time today and he decided to stay overnight because the power has finally come back on at home.  It’s still cold there, but he thinks he can handle it.  It’s costing me a lot more this month because we’ve had to eat out much more often and Christmas time is expensive and the hotel bills are definitely piling up. We’ve all been told by CP24 that the power outages should be fixed soon and hopefully, that fact is now coming true!

Today, we finally did our laundry from our Jamaica trip and from the last week.  That, at least, is a relief. 

Tonight, I am ordering in a pizza for myself for dinner.  It’s pizza for the second time this week.  It’s certainly been weird this week because, for Christmas dinner on Christmas Day, we had dinner at Boston Pizza and I’d ordered a Hawaiian pizza then.  Oh well, it’s a strange, strange world, isn’t it?

Post-vacation - Friday December 27, 2013:

Today, we’ll be checking out of the Comfort Inn.  It’s been fairly comfortable staying here, except when we had a day-long power outage yesterday until about dinnertime.  However, the power came back on and I am settling in for the evening, alone for the night.  Thank God, Dave went home early because he was starting to get on my nerves, big time!  You can always spend too much time with your roommate…..maybe that’s why I still want to work for a living.  Otherwise, we would drive each other nuts in no time at all!

I talked to my long-time girlfriend, Gerry Lenaghan, who lives in Brampton, Ontario.  She has also been affected by this massive power outage, but she seems to be coping with it alright.  Yesterday, I talked to my also-long-time girlfriend, Dale McDonough, who lives in Sudbury, Ontario.  She, unlike us, was not affected by lack of power and heat.  Good for her because Sudbury is definitely not a place where you’d want to be without utilities like power and heat!

There are some great TV movies playing at this time of year on the W channel, mostly to do with love themes and families.  This is the kind of stuff I just love to see, hear and write about because I’m still a romantic at heart and would like to believe in “forever”.  Thank God though, Dave is not here to argue with me today anymore about god-knows-what.  He can be a little hard to take sometimes, even at Christmas; despite that, I do care about him.  His daughter, who just moved to Whitby, close to us, lives with her in-laws (Yuk!) and her in-laws have decided that I am much too opinionated for them because of something I said about a certain member of their family.  What I said about him is the absolute truth, but that doesn’t seem to matter to them.  According to them, he is not the kind of person I said he was.  What I really meant is that he is not what I would consider a “forever” type of guy.  In other words, he’s the kind of guy who’s here for a good time, not a long time.  However, I am not one to keep quiet whenever I have an opinion about anyone or anything, so when someone tells me I am not welcome at their home because of a particular opinion I expressed, I feel that I do not want to have anything to do with those people.  This does not, by the way, include Dave’s daughter or her two little girls, who are little darlings that love me as much as I love them.  Somehow, I’m just going to have to develop a thicker skin from now on. Those morons’ opinions of me don’t ultimately make any difference to me.  

I intend that my narrative here will make it into one of my author blogs one day in the not-so-distant future, but for now, I may have to keep my thoughts to myself.  When the time is right, I will post this entry, along with my other thoughts about this particular December and people everywhere will just have to accept that I will always have my own opinions and that I live to write about them!