Friday night there was a crazy big storm all across the Twin Cities and surrounding towns. For about 20 minutes there was a wall of water against our windows, and our balcony doors were bending inward in a most alarming way. NT heard a gurgling as he passed by the bedroom and realized that rainwater was being forced through the vents and edges of our windows. We put cloths and towels along them and swapped them out a couple times as they got saturated. It was so weird! Our power flickered but didn't go out. I knew from Facebook that trees were going down and power outages happening all over, but we didn't realize how bad it was until we were actually out and about the next day.

Saturday morning I tried to do part of our shopping at our co-op, and they were closed because their power was out. Several traffic lights were completely out, not even flashing red. Later that morning, AS and I went to a fascinating alumni event at a Russian art museum that featured women in Soviet art. The bus was detoured a couple times, and we could see trees down all over.

Saturday evening we went to an event called Secret City, featuring art, performances and various fun activities in several locations around Minneapolis. Before that we ate at a restaurant with outdoor seating, just enjoying the mild weather. We headed home around 9:30 (way past the girls' bedtime) just as clouds were gathering for another storm, though this one was just rain, no crazy wind.

Sunday AS and I went out for Open Streets, a community event where they block off 20-30 blocks of a major thoroughfare and people can walk, bike, even do yoga or play chess in the middle of the road. We dropped off our bikes for tune-ups, stopped at some shops and bought some clothes (AS and I have been on a tear recently since none of our summer clothes from the past few years really fit us anymore) and a gift for a kid's b-day party later that day. Oh and we grabbed some food; some restaurants along the way had food stalls set up outside. There were huge trees down in some people's lawns along the street, and power was still out in some stores including our co-op.

After that we drove to the kid's party, which had been moved to an indoor playground because of the storminess. We have the use of some friends' SUV for the next couple of weeks so we used that. On the way we saw still more trees down and traffic lights out.

Our friends have been gradually getting their power back, but some areas may not get theirs until Wednesday.

Today, we all had the day off, so we sent the kids to daycare and spent a rare kid-free day relaxing. We had brunch, went to a couple spas to see if they had walk-in availability (no one did), wandered around doing a bit of shopping, picked up our tuned-up bikes, had a late lunch with some cocktails, and then NT went to class while AS and I picked up the girls. It was such a nice relaxing day with lots of time outside, despite another brief rainstorm. We saw still more trees down though; trying to drive from daycare to the brunch restaurant, NT wanted to take a right turn but had to pass up four streets in a row that had large trees across them -- some with squished cars still under them! I've never seen anything like this since I moved to the Cities in 1997.

We weighed in Sunday and I was up another pound. I was bummed because I'd tried to lose weight by not night snacking and by doing 5 mins of extra exercise every morning and every night. I'm still going to do both of those things, but I've decided I need to get back into calorie counting to get my weight back down. Ah well, at least I know it works for me. It's tedious, but it's the surest way to get back on track. Today was my first day counting calories and I went way over my goal because of the two meals out, but most days the next week should be more under control.

Anyway, all of the above spending is way out of the ordinary for us these days, but it all comes out of buckets of money that have already been saved up, so even though it feels a bit weird and out of control, we're not actually overspending at all. But I'm paying attention and tracking everything, because I feel like it could be very easy to get used to spending this freely.