I'm back, and so is the electricity!

Ohio isn't normally a state that has to deal with hurricane force winds, but Sunday they snuck up on us with basically no warning... For 6 hours the wind blew - sustained winds of 30 to 40 miles an hour, with gusts up to 75 miles an hour.

The freaky part? Not a drop of rain. Here is a photo of my backyard a couple of hours into the storm:

See how sunny it was? Really bizarre. See that gigantic tree limb? Luckily it didn't land on my car, or on our house!

I got home from Hocking Hills around 11:30am Sunday morning, caught up on email, did the radio show at 2pm, and took a little nap after it was over. About 3:45 I woke up and thought, wow, it's kinda windy out there... I talked to Walt on the phone for a few minutes, and while I was on the phone with him the power went out.

I turned the radio on to see what the deal was, and they were reporting that the entire state of Ohio was experiencing the storm, and that it wasn't supposed to end until 9pm. They were right - and by the time it was over, 2 million people were without power, the worst here in Franklin County, where there were around 400,000 people in the dark!

In the evening they broke the news that the power could be out for days, or even a week. No one was prepared, so it was a big scramble on Monday - most schools and some roads were closed, traffic lights were out, people were out searching for open stores to buy supplies, ice ran out in a matter of hours, etc. ...

We ventured out to the grocery and got some food, luckily we have a gas stove and a gas water heater, and we figured out how to make coffee by boiling water and pouring it through the coffee maker manually. That was really our biggest worry - if we hadn't figured that out, things could have gotten really ugly around here!

We saw half a tree knocked over across power lines at the end of our street, so we assumed we would be without power until the weekend. Luckily around 6:30pm today it came back on, and it hasn't gone out again. Of course this morning we had to empty our fridge, so I guess tomorrow morning I'll be headed to the store again...

All in all it wasn't that bad, more of an inconvenience than an emergency... We definitely can't complain when we compare what we went through to what the people on the Gulf Coast are going through!

Here's a few more photos I snapped yesterday:

The entire yard is covered in sticks and leaves... I called the landlord and told him he would have to send someone out to deal with the big stuff, but of course we haven't seen anyone yet. I'm hoping they will do something about this little stuff too, but if not I guess we will have to tackle it ourselves.

Here's my tiny front yard...

And here's the pile of stuff the neighborhood kids made in the middle of the cul-de-sac:

Here is the cable line hanging off the back of the house:

I was worried that even if the power came back on that our cable and internet wouldn't work until we could get that sucker back up where it is supposed to be, but luckily all is well.

Now I have to figure out how to get caught up on all the work that hasn't gotten done over the last 5 days! Once I get that all taken care of I'll be back to do my post about my trip to Hocking Hills...