A Mighty Wind is Blowin'

A majority of this post was written earlier this afternoon:

"Well I’m writing this as my laptop slowly loses its remaining battery life. It is a Sunday afternoon, Father’s Day, and the power is out. The day started out nice enough. It was sunny and hot, we even turned on the air conditioning. Hell, Dad, Mom, and I swam in the pool together for a little while. Eventually the clouds came out and blocked out the sun so we headed inside.

Mom just got the radio to work. There is nickel sized hail outside apparently. Sweet. Back to the story.

So we head inside and start watching America’s Best Dance Crew (season one reruns). It was the Michael Jackson Thriller challenge (my favorite episode) and then all of a sudden all of our power went out. I shortly heard a series of crashes outside and looked out the window to see that some of our guttering had fallen and a metal chair with a planter sitting on it had been blown off of our front porch and into our neighbor’s yard. So there are some pretty strong winds.

Two summers ago we had especially strong winds and a tree fell onto one side of my house, knocking off part of our roof and leaving us without power for 72 hours. You could literally push on the ceiling of my room (located in the attic of our house) and see sky. Thankfully there are no more large trees located around my house, so we should hopefully not have to suffer that fate again.

Hearing the chair and guttering crash was jarring, but not nearly as much as the quake that rattled the house when the tree fell. There have now been a few tornados spotted touching down on the ground in the surrounding counties. We have tornado watches a lot in Bloomington, but I’m pretty sure the town has only seen one in my lifetime. The winds don’t generally scare me, in fact I have inherited a little of my mom’s storm-chasing habits. The moment I heard the crash of the chair I wanted to head outside and feel the wind. Dad promptly ordered me inside where a flying branch couldn’t smack in the head or –god forbid- impale me.

The storm seems to be over now. The back windows of my car were rolled down, so that sucks. One of my dogs, Jesse the black lab, is frightened of pretty much everything and is still hiding under my parents’ bed. I’ve tried to coax him out from under there, but he doesn’t seem convinced that the storm is over. My neighbor is looking for her cat. Hopefully he found a safe place to hide during the short storm. Oh, and my favorite swim trunks, hanging on my back deck to dry after my early afternoon dip seem to have blown away. Guess I’ll have to head back to Old Navy for a replacement.

The best part of whole thing? When the storm started and the power went off, Mom was in the shower and didn’t know anything about it. She came out of the bathroom and was like, “Why aren’t the kitchen lights on?” Now I’m just waiting for the power to come back on and for my parents to get tired of listening to the weather reports so I can listen to some tunes."

While we were visiting my grandpa for Father's Day the power came back on. Things I've learned from this (and various others) power outage?

1. It's really not that bad if it happens during the day. You can still see.
2. Every house should have a few battery powered flashlights for such an occasion. Living by cell phone light is unacceptable.
3. The toilet does not need electricity to function.
4. For the first few hours of a power outage you will still instinctively flip on various light switches as you walk into rooms.
5. Only open the fridge/freezer if absolutely necessary. You don't know when it's coming back on.
6. Don't talk about not having electricity or "how hard it must have been back in the olden days". It will only make you miss television/the ability to see more.
7. It's very easy to read by daylight.
8. Perfect opportunity to go out to eat and visit people you should visit more often anyway.
9. No matter what you think, the power will come back on in time for you to set your alarm for the next morning. So don't even think about skipping work and using the outage as an excuse.