31st Birthday

My 31st birthday was slightly interesting. Well, not the day itself, but the dinner. We went to my favorite place in town to eat, Mad Mex, and chose to sit outside because it was such a beautiful evening. After we had ordered drinks and appetizers, we heard our waitress talking to someone at another table about not being able to cook or use the computers without electricity. When she passed by our table, I asked her what she was talking about and she explained that the power had gone out, so they couldn't make any food. Since we were outside, we didn't even notice that there was no power. We decided that we would eat our chips and wait it out to see if the power would come back on. At this point, we assumed it was just the restaurant or the complex without power. We finished our chips and there was still no power, so we decided to pay for what we had eaten and try another restaurant. As we headed down Route 19 to find another place to eat, we noticed all of the traffic lights were out and no places along the road seemed to have power either. We went about 3 miles before deciding to try a different road, assuming it was just Route 19 without power. We started calling friends and quickly learned that it was all of Cranberry, along with most of the rest of Butler county without power. So, not knowing what had happened or how long we may be without power, we thought we should probably get a generator from Randy's parents because I didn't want all of my breast milk in the freezer to go bad...I worked too hard to lose all of that "liquid gold". We headed to Zelienople, where for some crazy reason, they hadn't lost power, to visit with Pappers. Of course, at this point, we still hadn't had dinner, so we stopped at the most logical place to have a birthday dinner...Burger King! That wasn't exactly what I had in mind, but it was good enough at that point and one of the only places that had power! It wasn't until we arrived at Pappers' house that I realized we were going to miss the FINAL performances on American Idol AND the FINALE of Dancing with the Stars...and not only would we miss them, they weren't going to record. Now, if you know me at all, you know that I LOVE Hines Ward and I was devastated to miss seeing him WIN DWTS! That was the worst part of the whole thing by far! Anyhow, it was interesting to say the least! It turns out that there was a major blow to the main transformer for Butler County that caused the power outage. The power went out around 7pm and we didn't get power back until almost 1am. We made our 2nd attempt at Mad Mex the next night and everything went smoothly and my real birthday dinner was delicious!!

Our impromptu visit with Pappers

Our second birthday dinner attempt at Mad Mex = SUCCESS