We had one hell of a storm yesterday. Weather forecast said there would be thunderstorms with the possibility of hail. What an understatement. It started with thunder and lightning around 4pm (Paula had just finished mowing the lawn) followed by rain. Somewhere around 5:30 we realized that the rain was blowing sideways so hard we couldn’t see more than 3 feet out a window, and tree limbs were blowing onto our side deck. Then the hail started, and we remembered that we had left windows open upstairs. Mad scramble to close windows (the one in the side bedroom had let in a ton of water.) As we’re walking back downstairs, we hear an all-too familiar “ba-chirp” from the bedroom – cordless phone telling us that it no longer has power. Joy. Battery backup starts beeping away unhappily (the only things connected to it now are the cable modem and Sonicwall router anyway.) Both of our computers are laptops now, so I was able to log on and find out what the expected weather was. (“Thunderstorms with possible hail.” Wow, thanks for that…) Nice thing about laptops. My MacBook Pro said it had maybe 3 hours and 45 minutes of battery left. Paula has a Dell, which gives her, oh I dunno… 5 minutes maybe.
The rain stopped, so I went outside to survey the damage. Tree limbs everywhere, sticks, leaves all over the driveway. A woman in a minivan pulls up and says a tree fell over down the road. Probably what took out the power. I recall trying to call Public Service of New Hampshire a few times to see what their recording said, but kept getting a busy signal.
So it’s about 6:30, and we’re sitting here in the dark contemplating dinner. Grilling is out, since it’s supposed to rain again and the grill was probably soaked anyway (yay for a grill cover I never use!) I don’t want to keep opening the refrigerator since our backup generator isn’t hooked up. For the past hour, we’ve seen several cars heading down the road, probably in search of dinner, so we decide to do the same. On the way out of our neighborhood, we saw a bunch of trucks and emergency vehicles at the end of the street, along with a front-loader moving the remains of a large tree that had fallen in someone’s yard and taken down a power wire.
We ended up at a place in Goofstown called Patrick’s. Irish pub kinda place. We’d eaten there years ago and thought it was okay. Looks busy, but turns out most of the patrons are sitting around the bar laughing loudly at nothing in particular. For as drunk as they sounded, they probably weren’t even aware that a storm had rolled through. The evening’s entertainment was a table near us (started with 6 people but every half hour the number increased) that decided the entire restaurant was interested in their conversations. We heard all manner of stupidity, from how they were all drinking until it was time to go pick up their kids (nice example there) to how it is possible to blow one’s knee out playing golf (some sort of drunken golf cart accident.) Dinner arrives – Paula had a Georgia Peach chicken special that she said was good but the sauce was too runny, and I had cold prime rib, cold rice, and cold veggies. Appetizers were okay – shrimp wrapped in some sorta potato pasta and then fried. At least the waitress was friendly, even if she was a bit dim. Called home on the way out to see if we had power yet – nope. The recording at PSNH said that as of 5:30pm they were still doing damage assessment, but would update the recording at 7:30. This was at about 9:30 I think. The trucks were long gone from the end of the street, but no power yet.
We got home and lit a couple oil lamps. Since there wasn’t much else to do, we tried to read, but since it was so dark I ended up napping. At one point, power came back on, only to go out five minutes later with a blue-white flash from across the street. Lovely – transformer blew. Called PSNH to report it, but I don’t think the woman was really paying attention. She probably had been dealing with an entire evening of “I demand the power be turned on NOW because I am more important than the rest of the thousands of people in the state who have no power!” I doubted that the report even got filed.
Couple hours go by, Paula and the dog napping in a chair, me sorta napping in mine. At least it wasn’t 95 degrees and humid outside, and it never did start raining again, so we had the doors open. It’s times like this where you can easily forget what goes on outside. Typically we have the house closed up, air conditioners running, television blaring out CSI, Law and Order, or Good Eats, so we can’t hear the song of the swamp in our back yard. Spring peepers, frogs and toads with their “galumph” croaking (although apparently I am the only one hears these galumphing frogs – they always stop when someone else is around.) The campground across the lake was silent, but we could still smell campfires. The occasional bird asking its mother for a drink of water. I just laid here in the dark, listening to it all. Kinda nice to sleep to. Made me miss going camping every year, until I remembered all those cold nights in a wet sleeping bag, and the swarms of mosquitoes equipped with Glenn-seeking noses.
About 1AM, I woke up and realized we STILL don’t have power. I called PSNH again and noticed that the recording had changed – they expected to have power restored within 3 hours. I continued on to customer service and got someone different (the last person I spoke to sounded like a little Asian woman who hated her job, hated the phone, hated every person who called in wondering why their lights don’t work. Answers the question of what drives people to suddenly snap and go on shooting sprees in crowded malls.) I told her we had power hours ago but then there was a flash and it went out, and how I had reported it but didn’t think anything was actually filed. She checked the record to see that I had filed a report (via their automated thing) but there was no record of a blown transformer. (Nice.) She filed the report again.
Around 2:45AM, a large truck pulls up, and power came back on at 3AM. 3:15 my cell phone rings – PSNH wants to make sure we have power. Nice of them to check. 🙂
Today’s weather – more of the same.