just a little power

Dr. Grant: "Their radio is out too: Gennarro said to stay put."
       Ian Malcolm: "The kids OK?"
Dr. Grant: "I didn't ask, why wouldn't they be?"
       Ian Malcolm: "Kids get scared."
Dr. Grant: "What's to be scared about?  It's just a little hiccup in the power is all--"
       Ian Malcolm: "I didn't say I was scared.
Dr. Grant: "...I didn't say you were scared."
       Ian Malcolm: "I know."

I think it's only natural for me being such a huge fan of Jurassic Park to immediately recall lines from it during rain storms.  Or thunder storms.  Lightning storms?  Let's settle for tornado storms because hell, that's what it ended up being.  It took the news 24 hours to decide it was two tornados, and then a day later to settle on five.  And granted four of them were EF 1's on the Fujita scale ::pushes up nerd glasses:: one of them was an EF 2 and that's a little more substantial.  The damage they did was certainly substantial and caused Grand Chute to declare a state of emergency.

I woke up randomly Tuesday night in a weird panic (I hardly if ever wake up during storms.)  I could hear the wind and the rain on the side of the building and then the door to the office SLAMMED shut.  I jumped out of bed and hurried in there because the window was open and already my chair and the carpet a few feet in from the window were drenched.  Got the window shut (noted the CRAZY lightning) and then hurried to the living room to shut the door to my balcony.  Almost as soon as I shut it the power went out; it surged back on for a second and then it was out again.

The lightning wasn't stopping for even a split second and it illuminated the rain blowing sideways.  Not at an angle, totally sideways.  I should have believed Forrest Gump when he said he saw the same over in Vietnam.  Right away I was bummed that I had chosen to park outside but that came second to the fact that my metal chairs were skidding across the balcony and slamming against the railing like they were on puppet strings.  I wanted to go out and grab them but I was still so disoriented from waking up the way I did that I just stayed inside, hoping they wouldn't fling OVER the railing and slam through the windshield of someone's car.

That'd be a whoopsie.

Now, I'm not one to be afraid during storms.  I never have been (save for once or twice as a child I'm sure.)  I would be the first one at the window to watch and the last one to come in from riding bikes when the sky turned green to signify a tornado was possible.  I love them; the bigger the storm the better.  However, me now living alone with a storm that seemed just a little more powerful than most before it... that's different.  And scary.  Most of it was probably due to the power being out and me being a little disoriented, but hearing the building groan around me was a pretty sobering thing.  Almost (but not quite) to the point where I wanted to grab the cats and hunker down in the bathroom.

When I went to lay down again I looked at my phone and it was about 12:48; I'd only been asleep for an hour.  Went to sleep, woke up another hour later to all of the fire alarms in the building going off but also to the rain having stopped.  And my closet door was open.

Closed before... and now open.  That creeped the shit out of me.  I managed to turn my fire alarm off and eventually went into the hall with my hunky upstairs neighbor (he was shirtless (I didn't need the lights to see that (hubba hubba!)))  We couldn't get the alarm to turn off though and eventually maintenance showed up to do it for us.  The next day was a big visit at work so I woke up early to get that over with and then in the afternoon toured the devastation around town.  Almost 80,000 people without power, the Northland Mall roof heavily damaged, and several city blocks of Richmond Street with the power poles broken in half (see video below.)  There were tree stumps 20 feet tall that looked like they'd been snapped like twigs.  Houses crushed under huge Maple trees.  And people, everywhere you looked, already cutting fallen trees up and getting on with their lives.


I love storms like this.  Not for the fact that it ruins some people's lives and especially not because of any lives lost (allegedly only one life was lost due to the weather) but because it ends up forming a sense of community.  People come together, and maybe it's not to help each other, but it is to talk about something.  Something that we all have in common, and it's kind of nice that way.  Luckily there was no building damage here, but when I went to the dumpster last night with the (small) amount of my food that had spoiled in the powerless fridge, I was surprised to see the huge amount of food already in the trash.  So everyone loses something in some way I suppose.

I had called my energy company and they said the power could potentially be out until Saturday evening (almost four days.)  Realizing there was no reason to be upset about it, and I really wasn't, I just said "okay, thank you" and hung up.  Things are what they are and seeing the hundreds of WE Energies trucks all over the place made me feel like they were doing what they could.  Not like there was a shortage of shit for them to clean up and fix.  I went to the movies by myself last night and when the show was over it was close to 11:30.

The streets were mostly empty, save for a few cars.  With no power on most of the north side of town, there was so much blackness.  The highway was shut down due to the roofs of storage units having wrapped themselves around roadside power lines so I took the city streets, but not the main ones because they too were closed.  Driving in the pitch black down streets lined with fallen trees and smashed playsets just harkens to the visuals of a zombie apocalypse or whatever people with over imaginative minds like mine come up with.  Of course my building was still blacked out when I got home and once the headlights from the car were off I was surrounded in black as well.  There was something peaceful about it.

Creepy, but peaceful.

I think you start to take for granted what technology provides for you on a daily basis.  I know I do.  I need the light on and iPad playing when I'm in the bathroom, I can't sleep without the fan on me, and I've got to have my phone charging in the cradle all night so that it also acts as a clock for me.  I'll spend hours on the computer daily, writing or surfing the internet or listening to music, blah blah.  In a way it's nicer when none of that works anymore and you're forced to resort to alternate means of keeping yourself entertained.  For example, I finally started re-reading the Harry Potter books.  I'd been planning on doing it for months and hadn't had a reason to, so there it is.

But with today came a new day and when I got home from work this evening the power was still off as I expected.  Just another day of living an adventure I suppose.  I came upstairs, walked in, and locked the door behind me.  Then I heard the "surge" sound of something huge powering up and all of a sudden my ceiling fan started twisting to life.  In a way it was sad that the little excursion of "roughing it" was done, but at the same time I've never been so happy to stand in a hot shower.

Aside from all that, business resumes as usual.  Look for my owl!  I wish 2:06 actually happened to me today, though...  minus the arm thing.

Ciao kids (c;