Weird, Stressed Out Week

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Well, last Monday my area had a series of four bad storms capped off with a tornado. My building had a roof leak due to a broken skylight which was, in the overall view of things, pretty damn minor as just a couple blocks away houses were destroyed and flattened.

Power was out 24 hours at our house, and while the stuff in the freezer stayed frozen the stuff in the refrigerator got too warm for my comfort and we wound up tossing some ground beef and a bunch of condiments and the like we just couldn’t keep cool. How annoying, but, again, not the worst thing that could have happened.

Complicating things, on Tuesday morning I had A Very Important Appointment in the the city of Chicago that couldn’t be canceled or rescheduled - and the roads around us had trees down and parts of buildings blocking them. No traffic lights, every intersecton a 4-way stop. Yes, of course I started out on the journey 2 hours early, why do you ask? The electric trains were running, at least (about the only electric thing in the immediate area that was working) even if they were running late. Well, I I kept the appointment. Yippee.

No AC and a heat wave and a spouse who’s disabled and doesn’t tolerate temperature extremes the way he used to - oh, joy. He wound up with mild heat exhaustion. If our power had stayed out we might have rented a motel room, if we could find one with working AC, just to cool off, but the power came on again before we got to that point. On the plus side we had lots of battery-operated lights, and we now have two battery-operated fans.

Ya, we were a little stressed. Our neighbors who had to remove trees from their homes, or worse yet, who no longer had homes, were a lot stressed.

Meanwhile, a lot of local businesses were closed, including a lot of gas stations (no power for the pumps), so getting anything was a pain, involving long drives with multiple detours around blockages to find a place with power and stuff to buy.

I couldn’t get back to work house painting until Thursday because that’s how long it took them to unblock the road sufficiently for me to get to the house I was painting. At least the homes on that block were largely undamaged, although a couple vehicles got smashed flat by falling pines and maples. Mind you, that was NOT the hardest hit block by a long shot.

I think I may have a slow leak in one of the pickup truck tires - probably ran over road debris.

During all this the pet birds were totally stressed and LOUDLY protesting the change in routine, lack of lighting, and lack of TV (yes, they do watch TV). On Friday the conure was throwing up. Oh, great - is she sick? Did she eat something bad? Did she get spider bit or stung by something? Is it stress? She seems OK now, but geez, that’s all we needed, a sick pet.

Now I have a head cold - can’t stop sneezing, stuffed head, can’t sleep - so what else to do but whine on the Dope at 2 am? Damn, I don’t get sick days anymore…! I don’t think I’ll be up to working tomorrow.

Not the best week…

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oooo {{{{Broomstick}}}}} I can sympathize, in the winter our power goes out at random … I hope your headcold gets better faster than normal, stress tends to make things hang on longer than normal in my experience.

You might consider getting a small generator for in the future, it doesnt need to be much, enough to run the fridge, a light and a TV. It makes life in darkness so much easier. Being able to have cold drinks makes lack of AC much better, and you can put wet hand towels in the fridge to chill out to help cool someone down. Havng liht and TV woud help the poor birds …

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The generator sounds nice but at the moment we’re officially poor and I don’t think we can justify the cost - we didn’t lose much from the fridge, and in part that was because I just couldn’t get ice until about 16 hours into the power failure. That was because I had to get to my appointment more than I needed to save a pound of ground beef and a small jar of mayonnaise. If I hadn’t had to make that appointment I think we would have had ice much earlier and not even had that loss.

We did get some battery-powered fans, which help considerably with the lack of AC.

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Midwestern storms can really do a number, can’t they? Sorry for the battering your area took, Broomstick, and the resultant chaos. Purely sucks and even worse, there’s so little that can be done to prevent or mitigate it.

My area got slammed, hard, with freak storms a few weeks ago that uprooted huge trees, tipped over semis and of course knocked out anything resembling power for nearly a week. In the middle of that ghastly heat wave, too, of course. So much fun, temps in the 90s, sweltering humidity and no power.

I was lucky; power at home only went out for about 4 hours. Of course two huge trees came down. One split in half and destroyed my fence, which will take about $5K to replace and insurance will only partially cover. The other dropped with surgical precision right on top of my garden plots. Actually it’s rather miraculous because inches either way on the angle would have torn off my back porch or ripped the front off my neighbor’s house. Literally hundreds of huge old trees were destroyed though, not to mention a bunch of houses. Only two deaths though so it could have been much worse.

People were really great about helping each other out though. It was very heart warming. Did folks do the same up your way? At least some human kindness offsets the hassle and misery.

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Yeah, people were being pretty decent to each other.