Stormin'!

The world seems to be in utter commotion right now! The storms that have hammering the east and midwest since January and then the storms that hit the southeast last week a couple days before that massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Then we had those weird and unusual snow storms last month.

Then on Sunday we went to church. Everything seemed normal. The weather seemed normal, there was even a bit of blue sky. We came out of church and went over to a couple's house in our ward to help them install and get started with the Family Search Indexing program. We'd been there for about an hour when suddenly the wind started just hammering their house. Weird. We tried to ignore it and keep working but it was very distracting. About 5 min. or so after the wind started Traci called to tell us the power was out at our house! We were all thinking, here we go again with no electricity!

Then I was really distracted and their lights were flickering and then their power went out. By this time the rain was just hammering down and then we got some loud claps of thunder with some pretty intense lightening. This lasted for about 15 or so minutes and then it let up enough for us to make a run to our car. The inside passenger door of my car had a small pool of water where it had leaked in--not a usual occurrence, even with all the rain we get so that tells you how hard the rain was coming down. We turned on the highway to head home and saw a big line up of cars right before the High School. We thought accident at first but everyone was turning their cars around to go back, so we did, too, even though we couldn't see what was happening. My parents had just left the church so we met up with them and they followed us home (in case we got into difficulties we were together)...the route we went around had a tree down that had covered both lanes but three men were out getting drenched while they were cutting it up and moving it out of the road. Then we got to the intersection to turn back out onto the highway and we could still see the line of cars back by the high school but we still couldn't see what was happening but we were pretty sure it was a tree over the road. We made it home safely but there were trees and limbs down all over the place. We had no radio signals from our local cities so we knew they were out of power, too.

I didn't know til today just how widespread the damage was or how many people were out of power yesterday....we didn't get ours back til 8:30 PM and we were lucky. Some people didn't get theirs back til today and some areas will be without power til tomorrow (Tuesday)! There were trees that fell on houses, cars, etc. Power lines were snapped in half. One highway up north about 2 hours away had 5 power lines fall over in the road. A gal driving to work was caught in the middle of them and I bet she was so glad they didn't fall on her car. She was smart enough to stay in the car and call for help.

We couldn't get any information on what was going on yesterday so we just had to wait it out. We bought an indoor propane-run "Mr. Buddy" heater since the last power outage, but luckily we didn't need it as it wasn't as cold outside (about 44º) so it maintained enough warmth in our house. Traci had put food in her crock pot before we'd left for church, thankfully, and she moved it into a pot and took it to our neighbor's house, who has a wood stove, to finish cooking it, so we had some hot food.

I am realizing just how much we need to work on being better prepared for power outages. I had just dug out my little-cook-stove-one-burner-thing from my 72 hour kit when the power came back on. We had a kerosene lantern lit and 2 battery operated lanterns. Those camping supplies do come in handy.

They predict about 5 more storms coming in off the ocean for the rest of this week that should be powerful enough to hit as far away as Utah (and I only know that because my friend told me they were expecting storms from the west coast). Hold onto your hat!

Oh yeah, and another branch broke off my flowering cherry blossom tree! So sad!