Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Son of a Mother of a Storm!


Holy Mother of All Storms!! One umbrella and table went down early in the first quarter. At 11:30 p.m. the power went out and I was awakened from peaceful slumber by the collective final death beep from all my electronics, followed by the dreaded total silence of no power and the sound of HEAVY things flying around the backyard. When I went to investigate I could see the early carnage and am 100% certain of having to spend at least an hour retrieving and pitching damaged market umbrellas and other items from the backyard. Turns out I lost 2 out of 3 of last spring's new blue market umbrellas. Which is precisely why I always buy cheap -- the expensive ones break JUST as easily when blown across the yard. The second one was broken off mid-pole and managing to float (they usually sink rapidly, but I've gotten good at sunken umbrella retrieval) upside down in the deep end of the pool at 11:30 pm and had migrated to the shallow end by the time I got up this morning. (See photo of Connor viewing carnage.) This was a big one -- more wind even than most of the summer monsoons -- up to 74 mph winds. I've never seen one like this in December before. Was a little concerned that the awning would peel off the back patio.

Anyway, the power is still out this morning-- apparently I’m not alone as about 24,0000 to 61,000 (depending on what news report I read) homes remain without power this morning and as many as 250,000 homes were out at some point during the night. Fortunately, my local Starbucks (a happenin' place -- the mayor was just in and a former AZ AG is here now) was untouched and I'm gonna sit here and use their wifi and drink lattes as long as it takes. The radio said that "hopefully," they'd have power back to most homes by noon. Okay, great, but here's what I love -- a little pet peeve. I've lived in this house for almost 20 years now, and I've been through lots of outages. The power almost always goes out when we get any serious wind. BUT, the OTHER side of our street, never looses power. WTF?!! That is SO not fair. I can sit in my dark, cold, gonna-have-to-reset-every-frickin'-piece-of-electronic-equipment house and look across the street to the warm, well-lit homes where my neighbors are sipping hot coffee while watching the news (or Law & Order SVU if it were my house) after a nice warm shower. NOT fair. But I'm over it.

I have to confess -- the one piece of equipment that WAS working in my house this morning didn't get used. Yes, the New Digital (not to mention the Old Spring) scale was workin' just fine, but I chose not to use either one. It's been a tough morning already -- I really don't need to know. And although I didn't formally exercise this morning (which I could have done notwithstanding the big outage), I DID walk to Starbucks, so I should get points for that. TTFN.

1 comment:

  1. I was thinking about you as I retrieved MY market umbrella off the hood of my car. And I have the EXACT SAME PROBLEM: My power went out at 11:30 - neighbors across the street? Totally lit up! WTF?!! Power came back on at 11:00 this morning.

    I'ma finish up my "General Foods International Coffee" (ummmmm - it's as much a feeling as a flavor), and then go log my six miles. (I got on the Thinner with a flashlight. ha!)

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