Winds batter traffic signs Sunday on Jenny’s street. This picture was taken after the really rough stuff had past.
On Sunday, Ohio was hit with the remnants of Hurricane Ike, resulting in wind gusts of over 70 mph and leaving more than 1.92 million people without power.
Including us! Fortunately, our power outage was short-lived, relatively speaking. But it was fun while it lasted.
Yesterday afternoon, Andy was watching football with a friend in a neighboring town, and the kids and I were out taking a walk. When we started around 1:00 p.m., it was a pretty windy day. Then it became really windy, then can’t-hear-each-other-talk windy, and eventually can’t-push-the-stroller windy. When we were still a few minutes from our car, I turned around and walked backwards trying to keep the wind and debris out of Sam’s face, and I tried to communicate the importance of walking quickly without scaring Kate to death. I was worried that we were missing the tornado warnings while we were outside. I was quite relieved to get the kids in the car, but even then I didn’t know what we were in for.
I had promised Kate ice cream as a reward for our nearly-two-hour walk, so we headed around the corner to McDonald’s, but quickly discovered that the whole shopping center was already out of power. I called Andy to alert him of the situation, but I don’t think it sunk in until the NFL Network suddenly became unavailable. So because Kate still wanted ice cream, we headed to our version of 37 flavors – Grandma’s house. Not long after we arrived there, the power went out. By this point, Andy was on his way home, but what should have been about a 12-minute trip had turned into a 45-minute one because nearly every street leading to our town was blocked by fallen trees.
Eventually we got back to our house and discovered that half of the tree in our front yard was down and we were missing a few shingles, but nothing terrible had happened, thank goodness. The sun was still up, so the biggest inconvenience about our lack of electricity was the absence of television. Kate kept saying “But I want to watch a show!” as though that were enough to make it so. We played War, Chutes and Ladders and Candy Land more times than I could count, and eventually it was time to put the kids to bed.
Well, it was time according to Mommy’s clock, anyway. The sun was not cooperating. And neither was Kate. But by 7:30, they were both asleep (don’t be jealous – Sam proceeded to wake up every 30-ish minutes for the REST OF THE NIGHT). Andy listened to football (baseball? one of those) on the radio (that we lifted from Grandma’s house because we are unprepared for emergencies) and I read a book by candlelight.
Around 9 or so, Andy commented that he was waiting to get a call from the superintendent saying that school was canceled for Monday, and sure enough, five seconds later my cell phone was ringing with that very news. And right after that, I got a text message saying that “essential staff” were the only ones to report to my work. I called one of my co-workers, and he and I quickly came to the conclusion that we are far from ‘essential’ and would have the next day off. Suh-weet.
“You know,” i said to Andy about six hours into our power outage, “Not to get all Y2K on you or anything, but I guess we should probably get some emergency supplies together in the basement for the next time something like this happens.” We don’t always have the most, uh, well-stocked pantry, and while my dinner of Cheez-Its and My Little Pony fruit snacks was oddly satisfying last night, we could probably stand to have a few more provisions set aside. You’d think we would have thought this idea up before, but apparently we are still working on this ‘responsible adult’ thing.
About three seconds after I had this revelation, though, our power was restored. The tv came on, I fired up the computer, and angels sang.
Despite my long-winded description of our trauma, what we experienced yesterday was a minor inconvenience. A very minor one in comparison to what many people in our area and in the rest of the country are still experiencing. Many, many people in Ohio are still without power, and in our rural community, for a lot people no power means no water. Not cool at all. We drove around today and the sheer amount of branches and limbs and entire trees pulled out by the roots is ASTOUNDING. And even that doesn’t begin to compare with what people who bore the brunt of Ike are dealing with.
We are very thankful, and we are thinking of all of those whose lives aren’t yet back to normal.
So that’s our Crazy-Ass Wind Storm of 2008 story (yes, that is the technical term). What’s yours?
