Big Storm

Quinn left straight from work on Friday to head down to Portsmouth. It’s a 2 part mission… part 1 is to check out the reported standing water underneath River Shore, and part 2 is to go surfing this weekend! As of yesterday, I’d have expected that to be the big news for the weekend, but that was before last night’s nature performance.

The kids and I just hung out during the daytime. It was a SUPER hot sunny day, with a heat index well above 100º. After I put them in bed in the evening, I happened to check the weather, to see if it might rain (so I could shut the screened-in porch windows) Well, I’m glad I did. There were 3 warnings about severe thunderstorms! A massive system was moving towards us at 65 mph, full of high winds and golfball sized hail. It was about 11pm when I checked, and the warning expired at midnight. That left an hour for this reputed behemoth to hit us and be gone. I went out to the front porch to see how the air felt, and it wasn’t any different than it had been all day… a thick heavy blanket of hot humid air. No wind, no feeling of impending storm. I went around and shut all the porch windows, then headed upstairs. I figured I’d just read in bed til midnight, wait it out, then go to sleep. About 5 minutes after I got settled in bed, book in hand, the wind picked up. And when I say “picked up”, what I really mean is that it felt like I was standing in front of a house-sized Vornado, and someone came and turned it directly from “Off” to “High.” It was amazing. One second, the night was still and quiet. The next minute, the trees were whipping around like pinwheels pointed straight up at the sky. At that point, it was all wind, and nothing else. No rain, no thunder, no lightning. VERY eerie.

About 2 minutes after that, the lights flickered and went out. About 15 seconds after that, the boys came tearing up the stairs in a panic. By now the wind was pretty intense, though still no thunder and lightning. With all the windy chaos outside, I decided that it was time for us all to “camp out” in the boys’ room in the basement for the duration of the storm. I told the boys to go back down to their beds, and that we’d be there soon. I went in and woke up Nomes (poor sleepy critter), and gently herded her down the 2 flights of stairs to the basement. I got the boys in their beds, and built a little sleeping spot for Naomi and me on the floor. Then we waited. I’d drawn a pitcher of water before the power went out, and we shared some. By this time, the lightning and thunder had arrived, and it was a crazy sight to see the trees whipping around in the wind, illuminated by the constant flashes of lightning. I wish I had a camera that could have caught it, and I hope to never see anything that violent again.

By then, it was probably 11:40 or so, and I tried to get the kids to settle in and go to sleep, despite the raging storm and strange sleeping accommodations. The boys’ room was pretty hot (no AC in the basement), and with no fans to move the air around, it was fairly unpleasant. Also unpleasant was Ben’s constant whining about how hot it was, and how he couldn’t sleep. :sigh: Not a peep of complaint from Nate or Nomes though.

About 15 - 20 minutes later, just as I was drifting off, we were woken up by the alarm system going off. I’m not sure how it managed that, because the power to the house still wasn’t back on. Maybe it’s got a battery backup, and a limb smacked a window. Who knows? It happened once more after that as well, maybe at around 1am. I didn’t check the time in either instance, just zombie-walked up to the front door, flipped down the control panel cover, and made it stop blaring out its useless cry.

The power came back on at some point while it was still dark outside, but I stayed camped out on the floor until I could see the light, since I didn’t want the kids to wake up and be worried that I wasn’t there. I finally headed up to my bed at 6am, and crashed out hard until 8:30am. So… all in all, I probably got 4-5 hours of sleep last night. Garçon! More coffee!!

There were a couple neat things outside this morning, aside from all of the branches and leaves on the ground. One was that I was looking out at the mess, and saw a deer up in the woods. It was a gorgeous buck, rubbing at the velvet on his antlers! He’s maybe a 4 point, but it was hard to tell since he was in the dappled shadows. The other cool thing is that a dead branch that had been hanging from a tree since last year’s hurricane FINALLY got knocked down, and now isn’t a concussion danger to anyone any more. ☺

For as vicious as the storm was, we got off almost completely unscathed. From the house, I can’t see a single tree that’s fallen. There are lots of small branches and leaves scattered around the lawn and driveway to clean up, but nothing sizable. I just found a link to an article about the storm. Pretty neat reading, especially since I’ve never even heard of a “derecho” before.

Our cable internet got knocked out at some point, and when I called the automated number, I got the recorded message that they were aware of an outage in my area and had technicians working on it. We’ll see how that goes!

Update: It took until this morning (Monday) at 10:30am for our Comcast service to resume. I can’t even put into words how infuriating that was. The electricity was off for a max of maybe 4 hours, but it took Comcast 2.5 DAYS to resume service? Ugh.