No Power

Yes­ter­day a major storm blew (lit­er­ally) through Ohio, knock­ing out power far and wide across the state, my home included. The storm was par­tic­u­larly strange in that for a good part of the time, it was sunny and warm out­side as fierce winds ripped off roofs, uprooted trees, and gen­er­ally cre­ated havoc. It was an inter­est­ing jux­topo­si­tion of beauty and destruc­tion going on all at the same time. My under­stand­ing is that this was caused by the rem­nants of Hur­ri­cane Ike. See­ing what the storm did here on a sunny day just makes your heart go out to those in Galve­ston Texas and Gulf Coast who had to endure the full force of the storm.

The time after the storm has been inter­est­ing. Our neigh­bor­hood was with­out power, and peo­ple were walk­ing up and down the street com­par­ing notes on dam­age.  We hung out on our front porch for a while and took it all in.  I played gui­tar and the kids waived at the passers by.

Today, a roofer was spot­ted up the street, and quickly had a lengthy line of inter­ested cus­tomers sur­round­ing his truck. He actu­ally was able to repair our roof on the spot. I was hap­pily sur­prised as it was pretty banged up.

I spent a long time today try­ing to find a gas sta­tion that was both open and had gas. I finally man­aged to fill up just as the gas light came on. That was a bit too close for com­fort. The gas sta­tion itself was a zoo. Peo­ple were every­where, and the line for the pumps was 4 and 5 cars deep back­ing up into the sur­round­ing roads.

Luck­ily we have fam­ily mem­bers who did not lose power, so I was able to get some work done today, such as writ­ing this post.

Over­all, I am really glad that we are safe, look­ing for­ward to get­ting our power back, and really thank­ful that Hur­ri­canes don’t visit Ohio very often.