Weathering the Storm

I remember looking at the weather map yesterday afternoon and thinking, "This wasn't such a great day to ride my motorcycle to work..." There was a line of severe thunderstorms all the way from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and they would be hitting right about the time I was supposed to get off of work.

Deborah called a bit later to tell me the power had gone out, and to ask if she needed to go hide out in the bathroom — the safest room in our house for tornadoes. The sky wasn't the sickly green color I associate with tornado weather, and there wasn't anything worse than a severe thunderstorm warning, so I said that she didn't need to worry about how to entertain the kids in our itty-bitty bathroom.

After I got home, we went for a walk around the island (what else was there to do?) to see what damage had been done. There wasn't any to our place, thank God, but a few other places had not been so fortunate. It wasn't anywhere near the July 4 storm of a few years ago that necessitated the evacuation of the island, but there was some damage nonetheless.

This is the coach house, over by the Boathouse restaurant. This tree had dropped several large branches into the canal this winter, so I guess it was fairly weak already.

We followed the flashing lights and found the source of our own power outage. Another tree had come down, taking two power poles with it, one of then snapped off clean at the base. The firefighters were there mainly to keep things under control until NIPSCO could actually show up and do something about the downed lines. Deborah had called to report the outage, and had to listen to a list of some 50 towns that had power outages to see if Winona Lake was already on the list. It wasn't, so she added it.

You can see one of the poles leaning just above the brown shed. The architecture of many of the homes along the canal is... unique.

It was getting darker as we made our way home, and we realized that we only had one flashlight. Or, rather, we only had one working flashlight that Fiona had not disassembled and broken. The one left was a green dinosaur that roars when you pull the handle, and opens it's mouth to reveal the light. It has the advantage that we always know where the kids are...

Roar.

So we called up Paul. He brought over half a dozen or so lights, and I went out to get some batteries, and some ice cream for us all to enjoy by candlelight.

We got our power back awhile after midnight.