Back to the Dark Ages, Part II

I fully admit that as my memory of what happened during this time is really fuzzy, I may be missing some details or getting part of the timeline wrong. What I can tell you is that this is the series of events as I remember them, and I apologize for any inaccuracies.

 My power banks were not completely dead, but I knew I'd need more power for them. Daisy had made a deal with me before she'd gone over to the parents' that if it wasn't back, they could come get me on Friday -- as I no longer would have to work, Friday/Saturday are my normal days off -- and I could eat, recharge everything, enjoy some air conditioning and some company for several hours.

I had also had some foresight -- on Thursday night, when a lot of cell signal had finally returned (signifying that repairs to the power grid were, finally, really progressing) I had gone on Amazon from my phone and had ordered a massive power bank for next-day delivery. Knowing that such items generally come pre-charged at least halfway, if not more (some come fully charged right out of the box), I figured that it would be enough to get me through however long this bullshit was going to last once it arrived, in the event that I couldn't get over to the parents' that early on Friday. 

Charging my phone with my oldest power bank while I was dozed off that morning in the early morning hours in my chair killed that power bank down to 0% and only brought my phone up to around 70%. Charging my vapes and my mp3 player's speaker dropped the other one down to 30%, and then to 0% by around 9:30 that morning, after I'd showered in the dark by the light of the radio lantern to get all of the sweat off me.

I was able to reach Daisy and told her that whenever they wanted to come rescue me for the day, I'd be very grateful. The house was so very stuffy and humid and it was getting to the point where I could no longer really function without some actual food in my stomach or air conditioning. I was also going completely, totally stir crazy -- I had listened to the radio until it died, wound it back up and listened to it more until it died again, had read through every single comic I had in my reading stack to the point where I was so very sick of reading anything, and (because it didn't require electricity) pulled two fresh white shirts out of the closet to tie-dye them because I needed something to fucking do. 

Daisy and her parents did come to get me and I went over to their house for several hours -- I took a bag of everything I could think of that I would need to charge, and plugged all of it in once I got there. I got some food, some air conditioning, and some desperately-needed internet time on my phone, during which I reached out to my coworkers to let them know that no, I still did not have power and had no real ETA for when it would be back. I was also able to follow a lot of OPPD's repairs in real-time -- they were restoring about 10,000 customers every hour or two for a long time, and had already cut the outages in half -- but were already saying that some customers may not be restored for a week or more for the heavily-damaged areas.

And, let me tell you, there was heavy damage. Having been stuck at home, I hadn't been able to see the actual real-life devastation that 90-100mph winds could do, and had done, to most of the city. I'm not sure I've ever seen so many downed trees -- trees that had to 80-100 years old split right down their centers or completely uprooted. Garage doors and windows blown in. Entire trees resting on roofs that were very clearly caved in by the impact. So many, so many fences blown down in large chunks, or completely destroyed. Cars smashed by trees laying on their roofs. I've seen some pretty extensive storm damage before -- after all, I have lived in tornado alley for almost eighteen years now -- but never so much seemingly random and very widespread. Some large trees were completely destroyed and on top of people's homes, while other trees and homes twenty yards away looked pristine and untouched.

Our street, and many others, had the neighborhood denizens clean up what they could and place the debris on the curbs, which (we were told) would be picked up by city clean-up crews and hauled away. 

As I am writing this, it is August 23 and they haven't touched our street yet when it comes to storm cleanup. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

That Friday afternoon, once everything was charged, I came back to the house to take care of the cats and watch over it in the event power came back on. Daisy and I had an agreement that as soon as the power came back, I was to let her know and she'd come home. We also had an agreement that once it did come back, we weren't turning everything on immediately (like the air conditioner) so that if it died again in twenty minutes, it wouldn't blow stuff up.

The new power bank had arrived, delivered by Amazon, in the time I was over at the parents'. While Daisy gathered some stuff from the house to take back over to the parents' -- because as long as the power was out and we had no AC, she wasn't sleeping at home -- and cleaned the litter pans, I unboxed it to find that it had come with a 77% charge out of the box already. I immediately put it to use. 

Let me tell you, folks, invest in a good, high-capacity power bank if you have not already done so. This is the one I got, and holy shit:

 With 77% power out of the box, this little power bank charged my phone from almost dead to completely full no less than five times, charged all of my vapes countless times, and charged my mp3 player, and its speaker at least twice. At full power I may have been able to run my computer off it for a while. 

Shortly after 6pm on Friday night, we hit 48 hours without power.

At this point I was very hot and very frustrated; everything in the fridge and freezer was now certainly ruined and would need to be disposed of, and we'd just gotten a lot of groceries the week prior. Cold things, frozen things, and a lot of vegan things that were expensive. Adding insult to injury was that I'd just gotten two brand new bottles of pumpkin spice coffee creamer that I'd been waiting to come back into stock, finally, for the fall season -- and as soon as they had, I immediately snapped up two of the last ones the store had left. All ruined. Everything ruined.

Also, at this point we didn't even know if the fridge would turn back on when the power did, as we know our luck and the fridge was one of the big appliances in the house we had yet to replace -- and it's easily 20, 25 years old. 

I listened to podcasts and drifted in and out of sleep on the couch for most of the overnight hours; it was about all I could do. When my phone was charged I would obsessively check the OPPD restoral map and website for updates to see if there was anything new on restoral efforts. What had been over 200,000 on Wednesday night had dropped to about 60,000, then 40,000, and then as they worked they apparently must've hit/taken out another grid, because it jumped back up into the fifties again.

By the early morning hours of Saturday, before it was light outside, I made sure the cats were fine and I went upstairs to my office, where I opened up the window and put one of the battery-powered fans on my desk chair to blow cool air from outside directly on me. I then dozed off and on some more. 

It was far too hot to sleep upstairs -- heat rises, and it was already in the mid-80s in the master bedroom. The window and the little fan wouldn't help that much. The living room downstairs was by default the naturally coolest room in the house, and when it was cool I could open the window at one end and the French doors at the other end and establish a little airflow and circulation throughout the house. However, I didn't want to do that at night -- for one, raccoons, opossums, stray cats, rabbits, and all sorts of other creatures (including at least one skunk I have seen) use our neighborhood's backyards like a transit superhighway, and all I needed was for a skunk to come up on the porch, have one of the cats see it and go running to the screen door...

For two, even though it was pitch black dark in our entire area with everyone's power out, an open window even with a screen in it on the lower floor of a house, facing the street, is like begging someone to break in and start robbing the place -- something else I didn't want, especially not when I would be sleeping on the couch six feet from said window. 

The house stank. With no airflow and without our air cleaners able to run without power, every time one of the cats went to the pan, you would smell every scent molecule...eventually, once the scent made its way over to you. The air was stale, breathed-in, humid, and oppressive. Saturday's temperatures were supposed to be in the 90s and Sunday's were predicted to hit 100. 

This is part of the reason I went upstairs early Saturday morning -- I needed to go sit in my room and acclimate myself to the heat as the day got hotter. I have a battery-operated atomic clock on my wall that also has a thermometer on it -- the thermometer said that it was 88.9 in my office. The longer I could deal with that as it got hotter, the better it would feel when I went back downstairs later in the day where the temperature was only about 83ish. 

For perspective, we keep our thermostat, year round, anywhere between 67 and 71 depending on the time of year. In the summer, on the brutal days, I will occasionally put it down to 66 or 65 to make the air conditioner run longer, and in the winter when I'm freezing I'll sometimes turn it up to 72 to keep the furnace running for a while longer as well. The normal, ambient temperature in my upstairs office, even when the AC is on in the summer, rarely goes below 75. Right now as I write this, it's 77.

But 88.9 was not the end of it.

As the day went on that Saturday and everything heated up, it reached 96.7 in my office -- and this is well after I closed the window and curtain to keep the sun/heat out. There was nothing that could really be done. I forced myself to deal with it as long as I could, and began having flashbacks to summers in Kansas in that rented house with a very old, almost non-functional AC unit. 

Still, I thought, the cats -- though they were far younger then -- lived in Kansas with me without any real air conditioning, with nowhere near the number of amenities and conveniences they have now, and they were all fine. You lived through it too, Brandon -- you'll be fine. People and cats live without air conditioning all over the world and they survive it every day.

By the afternoon and evening hours I had finished off all of the bottles of water, Powerade, and almost any other hydrating liquid in the house. I was starving, I was very sleep-deprived, I was overheated, and I was just done with this no power bullshit. I would stare at the clock, sometimes talking to it, asking time itself to turn the power back on, please, it had been long enough. I was correct in my assumption that it would feel far better going downstairs after forcing myself to bake all day in the sauna that is the upstairs of the house -- but before I did, I took another cool shower in a desperate attempt to feel better. 

I used a coupon code I had in my email as well as a special deal discount that Papa John's was running, and ordered a single large pizza with extra cheese, roma tomatoes, and onions -- I have ordered pizza from the Papa for so long that it is, to this day, the only password I have memorized over the years and know it by heart. 

I only ordered one because, despite my appetite for pizza, it's not like I could stick it in the fridge or freezer for later. It arrived within 25 minutes and I tipped the delivery driver very well and told him he was my savior because I still had no power and just needed to eat something. 

I ate 2/3 of the pizza very rapidly, and saw movement on the street out of the corner of my eye -- it was multiple OPPD bucket trucks driving down my little residential street, followed by a few guys in hard hats walking up and down the sidewalks. Almost as soon as I texted this information to Daisy, all of them disappeared.

Around 6pm Saturday night, we hit 72 hours without power. 

It was also around this time where the new, very high-capacity power bank finally died, which left me with only the two smaller ones. 

Pete was not a fan of being without Daisy, but he was even less of a fan of the heat. He was flopped out on the couch next to me, dozing off and on, looking at me like "it's hot, bruh."

Empress was still fairly active and somewhat playful -- she brought me her ball to play fetch with her a few times before finally just giving up and sprawling out on the hardwood floor like "it's too hot for this shit, dad."

The temperature in the downstairs of the house reached 86. When I went upstairs to make sure they had new, cool, clean water in their bowls, it was 88.9 in the master bedroom and 96.8 in my office. Hank and Mable had tried to sleep upstairs in the hallway on the carpet and I very gently made them go back downstairs where it was much cooler.

It slowly began to get dark, and I'd resigned myself to yet another sweltering night without power. Daisy texted me and asked if I'd clean the litter boxes before it got too dark to see (it was already, frankly, too dark for me to see) and I told her I would. I also agreed to go back over to the parents' on Sunday, despite me needing to work Sunday night if the power was on, to again recharge things and get something to eat, soak in some air conditioning, etc.

About five minutes after that, I heard a click, saw the electric clock on the TV stand light up, and saw the ceiling fan slowly begin spinning again. 

After 74 hours, the power was finally back on. 

I immediately plugged in the power banks, as well as my phone, to get them to start recharging in the event that the power would go back out after a few minutes. It likely would've been a fruitless endeavor, but some juice is better than no juice. I also immediately texted Daisy to let her know the power was back on, and texted our neighbor (who was not at home) to let her know too. I turned on all of the ceiling fans and suddenly, there was air movement again throughout the house. The cats, who were all in deep heat-slumber scattered around the house, noticed the air movement and started to get peppy and awake again.

As excruciating as it was to wait, I waited about half an hour before (with a silent prayer to whatever higher power I do not believe in anyway) I turned on the air conditioner. It fired right up and began the long process of trying to cool down the house.

Daisy was dropped off by her parents a short time later, and we began putting our now-working appliances to use -- I could finally do some laundry, I could finally run the dishwasher to clean the multiple days' worth of dishes that had piled up. 

And then, we attacked the (now working) fridge and freezer.

Everything in it was, as we expected, a total loss. Everything in the freezer was cool to the touch, but it was certainly not frozen. Some stuff had liquified. A lot of stuff in the fridge had liquified. We didn't even bother trying to save the condiments or salad dressings or hot sauces -- it all went directly into the trash. The only thing save-able from the fridge was a ziploc bag full of candy bars I'd brought back from Canada -- candy bars that did not need to be refrigerated in the first place and were still somewhat cold. Everything else had to go -- hundreds, if not thousands of dollars of stockpiled frozen and refrigerated food, stuff that I didn't even know we had buried in the back of the fridge or freezer, all of it completely ruined and spoiled. To say we were devastated is an understatement. 

Aside from a brief fleeting power blip here and there over the course of the following few days, our power remained on and restored after it came back up. We had also found, upon closer examination of the storm damage over the time we were waiting for power restoral, that the one sole tree we have remaining on our property had a large, calf-sized branch that had cracked in half and was ready to come down in our backyard. Daisy ordered a pole saw and a handheld electric chainsaw and the next morning, Sunday, we used those tools to hack it off the tree, chop it up, and then we dragged it to the curb to match all of the damaged limbs and branches everyone else on the street had piled at the ends of their yards. That is where it remains even now, as mentioned above.

It took almost 24 hours before the AC returned the house to normal temperatures.

I put what remained of the pizza in the fridge once it was emptied and once Daisy gave it a good scrubdown cleaning (something she'd wanted to do for a while anyway). 

I did return to work that night (Sunday) and have been working since (well, more or less -- I'll get to this at another time). We did replace a lot of the food in the refrigerator/freezer -- slowly, cautiously, being mindful of what we really needed to have on hand versus what we just wanted. We even got a roofing crew to come out to the house and give us an estimate on the damage we sustained -- the piece of the siding that was ripped off was but a decorative cowling, not a true piece of siding; the roofing crew cut off the ripped part and nailed the rest of it back down in about thirty seconds. They also confirmed that we were missing zero shingles and the roof looked to be in relatively great shape -- so the shingles we found in our yard after the storm were not ours, apparently. Whose were they? Who knows -- 100mph winds could've blown them in from multiple blocks away. We tossed them in the trash. 

In the time since, life has returned to mostly normal. OPPD was indeed correct -- it did take some people in the area a week or more to have their power restored. Some people around the area (including some folks I work with) had a lot more damage, or they had power but their Cox internet was out for two more weeks before it was restored. As far as I am aware, no lives were lost in the storm.

So, that's the story. I am really, really hoping we don't have to live through such a nightmare again -- or any other nightmares, honestly, as we've had enough in 2024 as it is -- anytime soon.

More updates to come soon, as I have a lot to talk about that I have not even touched on here yet. 

Back to the Dark Ages, Part I

 I am...getting very, very tired of 2024.

I am about to tell you a story of events that happened a few weeks ago, and involved some particularly trying times. I'm not looking for sympathy or help (believe me, we're fine) but I am going to lay it out here for everyone because it was not pleasant.

As a lot of you know, this year has been, frankly, terrible for severe weather in the midwest. We have had numerous tornado close calls in and around Omaha, and some in April and May that actually hit parts of the city (notably the west side of Omaha, as well as the airport to the east of us). These storms, up until recently, thankfully missed our section of town -- or if we did get them, the effects were far milder than expected. There were several nights, though, where the tornado sirens went off at like 3, 4-something in the morning, and Daisy had to get up, come downstairs and help me wrangle the cats to get them into their carriers in the event that the tornadoes came close enough to where we'd have to either leave and take them with us or cram ourselves into the sturdiest, most closed-off room in the house -- our downstairs bathroom -- and hope for the best. 

As an aside, if you've never had to chase down, catch, and cram five cats -- two of them geriatric, and three of them who absolutely hate carriers -- into carriers in an emergency, all while tornado sirens are going off and you're trying to pay attention to the television to see if tornadoes are headed for your neighborhood and because it's still the overnight during the week, still being logged in and trying to work...I do not recommend this horseshit. It is not fun and one of the many reasons I absolutely must get out of the midwest as soon as humanly possible.

Anyway.

Our luck had been pretty good. The storms this season mostly blew over us or by us, and we could let the cats out of their carriers once the threat had passed, Daisy could go back to bed, I could resume my night of work and devote my full attention to it, etc. But this happened multiple times, and my nerves and patience for this spring/summer's storm season was at an end. By the time we returned from Canada in late June, I figured we were pretty much done with it.

And then July 31st happened.

Understand that in most years, July 31st is way past the "peak season" for tornadoes and severe weather in the midwestern states, even in the places I've lived (Missouri, Kansas, and now Nebraska). May and June are generally the high-point months, though it's been particularly nasty a few years in March and April too as the temperatures and weather patterns shift in the spring. So, end of July and into August we're reaching our hottest weather of the year in Omaha, but the weather is generally fairly quiet as we round the bell curve and head into more seasonal fall-like weather of September and October. 

As you folks know, I tend to follow weather pretty closely -- partly because of anxiety and partly because, especially in the months when I have to do so, I need to know when and how I will be able to mow the grass and do the string trimming, and Daisy needs to know when she has to water the garden and when she won't. My weather obsession also allows me to warn people at work, most of whom don't care because they don't have property to protect/live in secure apartment complexes, etc and won't follow the weather, that there's some bad stuff coming and that they should save their work frequently, and text us in leadership if they lose power or internet and the like. In the days leading up to the end of July, the weather people in and around Omaha predicted some moderate severe weather over the course of a few days that either never developed, or developed somewhere else than where they predicted, or started to develop but fizzled out. So, I wasn't really that concerned -- after all, the two giant trees that were problematic on our property we'd had removed after the storms of 2021. They were the only two trees around us that could have done substantial damage to our home were they to come down (and believe me, had we left them up, they would have in storms we've gotten between 2021 and now). Tornadoes are one thing -- straight line winds and downbursts that can't really be predicted more than a few minutes to an hour in advance are quite another.

So, on July 31, I had just gotten up for a normal Wednesday night of work when the sirens began going off. While there were a few small tornadoes around the area (the siren will trigger when there's one anywhere in the county, and I don't know how many were actually confirmed) the sirens were because the storm front that had formed while I had been sleeping that day, and had begun moving through the area, was capable of 80-100mph winds -- with a lot of those winds already being clocked at weather stations around and outside the city in the 70-90mph range.

This is wildly unusual for Nebraska. Yeah, the midwest is windy -- it is almost never like that. 

We turned on the TV, of course, and got the cats into the carriers in the event that we'd need to evacuate. It was at least 85 degrees outside -- muggy and stuffy, and in the span of about ten minutes, it got dark. Dark as actual night, at 6pm in July. The streetlights kicked on. Our porch light kicked on. And for a while, all was calm -- it looked like the worst of the storms were going to blow over us or blow by our part of the city. 

And then it hit. 

It's been a long time since I've seen storm winds like that. The house shook, everything rattled. The winds ripped giant limbs off trees at houses down the street, and they crashed to the ground and rolled, or were blown into roofs. The power went off and on about five or six times in very rapid succession over the course of a minute or two, and Daisy basically dove to turn off the air conditioner so that the fluctuations did not blow it up after we'd just had it fixed, all the while telling me, begging and pleading with me to get away from the windows to avoid flying limbs and objects (of which there were many -- but the wind was blowing from the opposite direction). After a few minutes of clicking off and on, the power finally gave out and stayed out. The storm raged outside. With it being black as night, I couldn't see anything inside the house -- I have really bad night vision. I also had an amazing, overruling anxiety need to watch the storm from the front window and watch when it passed enough to where we could basically look at it and say that we were in the all clear, or clear enough to get the cats back out of their carriers.

This took about an hour. In the midst of this, around 6:30 or so, I called in the power outage to report it, because that's what you're supposed to do. The automated message told me it would be fixed around 8:30.

Uh huh. Sure.

When the storm passed, it became light again outside -- at least normal lightness for a normal July evening, where it doesn't get dark dark until after 9pm. When it was done, people in the neighborhood began exiting their homes to survey damage and remove tree limbs from blocking the street. A trim piece of siding on the top level of our house was ripped off and hanging above our garage. There were shingles in our yard -- we did not know if they were ours or someone else's, because 90-100mph winds. There was damage and debris from trees all around us, in our yard, the street, on people's homes, etc. 

We were very thankful that we'd removed the large trees from our yard when we did.

But the power was still out.

We used our phones to follow the weather and confirm that the worst of everything was done for our area. Our signals were weak and it would take several tries to load a webpage at times. I had texted my boss and our crew at work that night (who was just arriving) that we had some minor damage to the house and the entire neighborhood was without power. My boss responded that he'd taken the night off work because he'd been sick anyhow, but he also had some minor house damage. I let them know that as long as all my stuff worked, as soon as the power came back up, I'd login. 

While the storms passed us, they were still wreaking havoc on the rest of the surrounding area, and that included what appeared to be the power stations feeding the cell towers. We went from spotty signal to zero signal on our phones at the drop of a hat. And when I say zero I mean just that -- no calls, no texts, no 5G internet, nothing. The entire network was gone, as if it was just wiped off the map. 

So, let's recap -- it's the middle of the week, last day of the month, it's 85 degrees outside (it dropped to around 70 once the storm rolled through), and we have no power. We have no power, it's getting dark and we haven't eaten anything yet, and we have no phones, no internet. Without power, we have no air conditioning -- in fact, no air movement whatsoever. We can see that there's been some damage to the house, but we don't know the extent of it -- for all we knew, there could have been water pouring down through the roof through holes or damage we didn't know about. We have two black cats we can't see in the dark, and three others who like to get under your feet at every opportunity. Oh, and because the power's out, we can't even get out of the garage to leave the house because we can't re-engage the garage door opener ourselves if we disengage it, as the spring's tension is what actually holds the door closed, not gravity or the door itself -- not to mention we wouldn't be able to lock it. The last time we disengaged it we had to call professionals to actually hook it back up.

We were, essentially, in the dark ages. 

However, all was not lost. 

After the storms in April and May, however, I invested in a multipurpose lantern/flashlight, weather and normal radio, and power-bank combo device that charged and ran from wind-up (it could also be fully charged via USB when there was power, of course). It was $30 at the time, and I knew that I'd rather have it and not need it than not have it when I really did. Well, now seemed to be that time. The lantern provided us some light once it was fully dark, and we sat on the couch and played a card game while we essentially waited for the power to come back on or for our phones to work again. I also had two separate power banks I'd purchased in the past for occasions like this, so we were able to charge up our phones.

By the time it got around to 11pm we were occasionally getting spotty signal on our phones again -- the power company said they'd clocked something like 218,000 outages in their service area from the storm. This was the biggest outage in their recorded history, and they were working around the clock to get damage repaired and service restored to their customers. Resigning myself to knowing that the power would likely not be back that night (and even if it was, it was going to come back while I was sleeping), Daisy and I got some battery powered fans, opened the window upstairs, and went to bed.

When I awoke around 5am, the power was still off. There was still almost no signal on my phone. I could occasionally get the OPPD (the power company) webpage to load detailing the outage numbers, and it appeared they were making good progress -- fixing about 5-10k customers per hour. 

I want to stop here for a moment to elaborate on how miserable it is to live without power in the 21st century, especially in a house that really doesn't have great cooling/ventilation/natural light, because ours does not have any of those things. You can't really do anything to not just keep busy or pass time, but you can't cook, you can't see, you can't do any real amount of chores, you can't even really eat anything because if you open the fridge, it lets the cold out. You're bound by what you can do in natural light, and that's about it. However, if it's very hot outside, you won't even want to do that stuff.

Daisy and I sat around the house most of Thursday as the temperature got hotter -- there was little else to do. As Thursday evening rolled around and we entered 24 hours without power, Daisy couldn't really take it anymore and said she was going to go sleep at her parents' -- who had never lost power, who had food and air conditioning and internet, and invited me to come with her. They'd come pick us up, it would be fine.

I couldn't do that -- I wanted to be here in the event the power came back, as I would need to work (I work on Thursday nights). Also, with the power completely out for the neighborhood, that meant no security cameras, no Ring, no security system whatsoever but me and my weapons, and we're not in the best neighborhood, though far from the worst -- it would be, for the criminal mind, prime time for home break-ins when, without cameras on them at all times, thieves would be bolder and know they wouldn't be caught.

Plus, I mean, the cats are here. Mable overheats easily, which we saw when we got back from Canada and still had to wait several days for the air conditioner to be repaired. I wanted to make sure the cats had food, fresh and cold water, and treats to keep them at least somewhat comfortable -- as much as possible -- while we lived through this ordeal.

So Daisy went over to the parents' and I stayed here at the house with the animals. I made sure I had reading materials, and luckily my mp3 player and speaker downstairs were both fully charged. I crashed out on the couch as it was much cooler downstairs, eventually moved upstairs to my chair in my room, and slept some more. My memories during this time are hazy/fuzzy as I was just so overheated, could barely sleep, and was so incredibly bored more than anything else with nothing I could do to alleviate it. I had considered writing, but I would require light for that and, also, my brain was so fuzzy that I couldn't really focus long enough to do anything worthwhile. I'm sure I was in the first stages of heatstroke. 

On Friday morning, the power was still off -- 36 hours now without it.