… and all I got was a fridge full of spoiled food.

Last Sunday (the 14th) Cincinnati had a huge windstorm leftover from Hurricane Ike.  It was really quite unexpected as the most we’ve ever really gotten from hurricane leftovers was a fair breeze and some rain, so nobody really thought that we could get winds reaching up to 60 MPH.

While watching the Bengals blowing just as hard as the winds that day, the power flickered a bit at Joe’s for a bit, then went out a short time later.  I went back to my place to see if it was just his street/house or all of the area and sure enough, power was still on at my place.  I called Joe and Mike over so they could keep watching football and about 10 minutes after they came over, the majority of Oakley lost power.

Trees were down all over the place.  A tree on Drake Avenue had fallen the length of the road and taken out two telephone polls, nearly every other street was closed off because of downed power lines, and of course everyone on the roads became a total idiot without traffic lights.  FOR REFERENCE… if a traffic light is out, you treat it as a stop sign, you don’t just assume that you should keep going through the intersection because you’re already driving 10MPH over the speed limit.  (I kinda hoped that someone would just nail my car as a result of this so I could laugh in their face as I get a new one… I know, I’m a bit twisted.)

So anyway, with the power out there wasn’t that much to do.  As I said previously, it was really unexpected.   Joe, Kristen, Mike and I really just sat around watching trees be torn apart and half napping until the evening, when Joe and Kristen went to a party where the electricity was still on.  Mike and I eventually went to a bar down the road that amazingly still had power.

Monday morning I got a call from Lindsey saying that the power was out at work, but I figured it would be smart to at least show up and not assume that I wouldn’t have to work.  As expected, I arrived to find out that there was nothing we could do about it and that the building was too pitch black to even do some manual labor.

I went home and decided to take a walk to see how torn up Oakley was and to check what time the library opened. (they still had power.)  On my way back, Kristen saw me and picked me up.  She was going to check out the house of some family friends that were on vacation and make sure everything was okay.  I went back to Joe and Kristen’s place afterwords and we started cleaning up their yard.  Their neighbors have a huge tree that reaches over into their yard and it left some larger branches for us to clean up.  We started a fire and just ended up burning a lot of it for the sake of getting rid of it.  Around lunch time, Joe and I went to my place and tried to recover as much food out of the fridge as we could, then we used his grill to cook some of it.  Unfortunately I still ended up throwing away a lot of delicious stuff, but it’s good to know that it wasn’t entirely wasted.

Joe and Kristen’s power came back around 2pm on Monday, but our power didn’t come back until around 1pm on Wednesday.  The showers by candlelight were starting to grow on me. (Thank goodness we still had hot water!)  My parents just got their power back yesterday around 1pm… just shy of a full week without power.

So after a really miserable week in general I’m hoping things will be back on track this week.

Tags: Oakley, power outage, weather, wind storm

This weekend my mom IMed me and told me that my dad was going back to his old Job in Cincinnati (The same foundry that I used to work at) and that they would be selling the house and moving to Cincy in (hopefully) near future.  Now that I no longer live in Franklin and none of my friends live in Franklin (at least nobody I talk to on a regular basis) that pretty much means that chapter of my life will come to a close and that at best, I won’t have a reason to visit but once a year, if that.

Franklin was the place where I grew up.  My family moved from Troy in 1989 when I was 7 when my dad got a job at a Foundry in Franklin. (which he left to go the place in Cincinnati, then went back to, and is now leaving again for the same place in Cincinnati.)  Having only lived in Cincinnati for the last 3 years, it’s not hard to say that most of my memories are of Franklin.  I spent the majority of my life there.  I met my best friends there.  I graduated from Franklin High School, learned to drive around the streets of Franklin, voted for the first time in Franklin… you get the idea.  I can barely remember Troy.  I remember certain things, I’m sure I could strike up some memories if I had to, but a lot of it is very faint.  Granted, I was 7 when we left, but I couldn’t tell you exactly how to get to my old house or schools… I might be able to draw a rough diagram of our house but I couldn’t tell you what color the carpet was, where the fridge was in the kitchen and such.  My point is that while it was my home, it no longer seems to be as big of a part of my life.

Although my mother seems to be a bit worried about what the future holds I think this is absolutely awesome.  I think that they should just move to Oakley but I don’t think they are too keen on the idea.  Just as long as they are closer I think I will be satisfied.

Mike has been looking for an apartment with one of his friends for about a month now.  Their desire to find a place had been on and off a bit since Mike moved back to Ohio, but Mike looked at a place on Saturday that he’s super excited about and his friend is going to check it out with him tonight.  Who knows.  He might be moved out by the end of the week for all I know.  He knows he’s welcome to stay with me as long as he wants but I think sleeping on a couch for about 7 months has hit its limit.

I hope to be looking at houses soon.  A year ago I said I wanted to start looking around this time and in the Spring, when the bottom sort of fell out of economy and the dollar began it’s great downward spiral I thought that I should wait up to a year longer to make sure I have everything in order.  But now I feel like I’m in a “s**t or get off the pot” situation.  The way I see it, I can keep saying I’m going to start looking at a certain point in the future and keep pushing it back 6 months at a time or I can buckle down, start taking the steps I need to take now and be prepared to jump on a deal that comes along.  I’ve really started doing my homework and I’ve filled out a few pre-approval applications online that have told me a rough estimate of how much I’m going to need to front at closing, what interest rates I can get and such.  I’m working on devising a budget that can fast track me to that amount.

The biggest issue with my plan is my job.  I haven’t had a raise in a year and a half.  I can understand that we had to let people go earlier this year and that the economy is in rough shape, but it doesn’t change the fact that my research shows that I am well below the bottom of the “average” for my job in the Cincinnati area.  I love my job, but I don’t know how much longer I can love it if I can’t achieve my goals while I’m working here. I know I can’t build my financial plan off of expecting a raise, but I do think it’s fair to expect that you can at least keep up with inflation.  Doesn’t seem to me like 0% is keeping up with anything.  Anyway, I’m ranting now so I better stop.

See ya.

Tags: Franklin, House, Mike, Oakley, work