… 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