A Dark and Stormy Night

The weather has oscillated between chilly (although perhaps seasonal) and too warm for the calendar.  Monday was very warm, and that night we had the upstairs windows open and the attic fan on.  Not much sleep that night.  First, it was hot upstairs, and it seemed like every time I went to sleep the weather radio would go off, with a warning that there were severe storms in the area.  I grew up in Oklahoma, in towns that periodically got wiped off the map by tornadoes, so I have great respect for weather; I would listen each time for long enough to make sure that it wasn't a tornado warning for Atlanta, and then hit the button to end the message but leave the radio on.

It was sometime around midnight that there was a really loud crash.  I went downstairs in the dark to make sure things were okay; I didn't see anything wrong, but I didn't look very hard.  Whatever it was, it didn't seem to be inside the house.  It wasn't long after that that I was up again; the power was off, and the alarms on the uninterrupted power supplies on the computers were beeping.  Outside, it was still windy with rain.  Caroline got up too and she turned off the computers and we unplugged other electronics; upstairs, we closed the windows to keep out the rain.  She was texting her friends and got updates from around the area, who had power and who didn't.  (High school kids apparently only sleep in the daytime.)  She looked out into the street, into the storm, and said there were tree branches in the street, but my car looked okay; we saw a driver made his way, then, past the downed branches so it must not be too bad.  Whether the car was okay or not, I wasn't going outside to check; even if the storm wasn't still going on, it wouldn't be safe to go outside in the dark with the possibility of downed powerlines.

I personally have gone over that list from Ready.gov with the Cub Scouts, for what you need to be prepared at home, but in the morning we couldn't find any of the probably 20 flashlights that are somewhere in the house; I couldn't even find - without Tom's help - the matches.  The battery powered lantern - which I did eventually find -  hadn't been recharged after the last camping trip.  So Tom made an early morning trip to Home Depot for flashlights, making his way through the neighborhood in the dark with trees down blocking streets at random.  But before he went to Home Depot, he was standing in the doorway and told me that the large limbs that had fallen from the tulip poplar across the street were on top of my car.

We were still worried about downed power lines so I didn't get out to check the damage until it was light.  That loud crashing sound the night before had almost certainly been the back of my car, exploding.

An early morning phone call to the 24 hour toll-free claim number at State Farm ("There's a tree on my car"), and a vague assurance that I would hear back sometime ("This morning?" "Probably not").  Retrieving stuff from the trunk through the broken back window.  It was back to being cold again, and I had to wear a jacket.  The one thing that had been in the car that mattered - the box of material for updating my overdue book chapter - wasn't damaged by the rain that had gotten in through the broken window over night.

The power came on around midnight the following night, and then went off again.  When I got home from work, I called Georgia Power and the automated voice (with a warm Georgia accent) said they expected to have the power back on that day.  I took the kids out to dinner, and just as we returned, a convoy of Georgia Power and Altec trucks appeared in front of the house.  Tom and I sat on the porch and watched them, working under bright lights on the darkened street, put the power line that had slipped off the insulator on the top of the pole back into place.  I told Tom, those guys, they're heroes.  They moved on up the street, and it wasn't long before we noticed the street lights were back on.  We turned around and looked inside, and the lights were on in our kitchen. 

I found Iain upstairs asleep, with his bedroom light on; the power had come back on after he had gone to bed.  I switched it off, and went to bed.