She Erupted! Mt. Redoubt, That Is

I've received a couple of emails from friends and family wondering about this crazy volcano, so I thought I'd type up my observations from today. Yeah... we're pretty close to the volcano. We can see it right from our kitchen window. It's about 50 miles west of us. Here's what has happened (feel free to skim... it's not that exciting!).

Maybe Redoubt is a boy and this post should be titled, "He Erupted!"... I don't know. But yes, last night at about 10:38 p.m., Redoubt did her/his thing. The volcano erupted four or five times spitting out ash clouds that reached about 60,000 feet. Jacob and I were up, but we didn't even know anything had happened until this morning (actually, I probably still wouldn't know except for the fact that Jacob called from school to tell me!). We're all safe and well and even the sulfur that we smelled earlier in the morning is gone now.

To add to our excitement, I was getting ready to take Ammon to school when the power went out. Apparently, the entire Kenai Peninsula lost power for about an hour or hour and a half?? (I wasn't watching the clock). We quickly put our batteries in our radio and found out that a transmission line from Anchorage that provides power for the Peninsula faltered. The last I heard (I haven't been listening for updates on this), Homer Electric officials weren't stating whether it was related to the volcano's eruption. Probably not though, since I just read that there were also brief power outages in different parts of the Peninsula starting yesterday.

Anyway, with the volcano's news and then the power outage, Ammon, Abraham, Ziya and I decided to say a prayer and listen to the Holy Ghost telling us what we should do. Our main question was whether we should still take Ammon to school. I'd already called his school and was NOT pleased to hear that they didn't even have a computer up and going to keep them updated. They also hadn't heard anything from the Central Offices. So I called the Central Offices and they said the schools should have been operating on emergency generators. We opted to turn to prayer! After the prayer, Ammon said that his heart was beating fast so that means he should still go to school (today was the first day back after spring break and he was excited to see his buddies again!). I, on the other hand, felt more comfortable keeping my little family as together as we could be. We all agreed to have a "home school" day.

A home school day was just what we needed, since we didn't pull out Ammon's stuff from school until late last night and we realized that he was actually supposed to do some work over the week-long spring break (oops!). We're all caught up now. We did a bunch of math pages, then some reading and now Ziya is napping and we've just finished "indoor recess" (a Disney math video that we picked up at the library last week!). It has been really fun. Ammon probably would have been totally fine to go to school... but sometimes it's good just to have a stay-at-home day!

Tonight for Family Home Evening, I think that we'll work together to make a couple more preparations for emergencies. We've been buying all the stuff for our 72-hour kits, but they are not yet assembled. Seems like a good time to do that!

p.s. I don't think anybody has published any pictures of last night's eruption (since it was pitch black outside)... but the picture I posted is from Alaska's Volcano Observatory page. The picture was taken on the 15th of this month. It was the day that we were out on a walk admiring the lonely cloud that was hanging around Redoubt!!!