Thursday, July 1, 2010

Little Bit of Catch Up

Things got a little crazy here at the end of last week. For those of you reading this who are not local, we had a huge storm blow through which kinda changed last week's plans.

We were all at my sister's pool. Well, it's not really HER pool but her community's pool. That's right, her community has a pool that everyone in that area can buy a membership to. So instead of paying the up to $1000 or so to join a pool in my area, she pays about $100 (yes, that's one less zero) for her family to enjoy the two large pools within walking distance from her house. We try to join up there every Thursday for "Cousins Club," so on Thursday, the kids were all splashing in the water as the grown ups watched the sky get progressively darker. Suddenly the lifeguards began running and shouting, "Get out of the pool!" I flashbacked to the movie Jaws for a moment to the scene where they realized the shark was close and everyone started screaming and pulling their children out of the ocean. Apparently lightening had just struck the field a short distance from the pools. I have never seen lifeguards move that fast.

We ended up driving home as the sky opened to release buckets and buckets of rain and hail and wind, causing trees to fall, causing roads to close and power lines to fall (and cause fires in the roads), causing detours to happen, causing our ride home to take three times longer than it normally does. Power was out all over by the time we got home. When the rain finally stopped, the power was still out - and it was HOT! We found a mall that had a working back-up generator and went there for some AC and dinner, but came back to a stifling house. Eventually everyone got to sleep, but it was really tough. Around 3:15 that morning the sweet sound of the fan and the feel of a cool breeze woke me as our power finally came back on. Lots of other people in the area were not so lucky; my parents' power was off until late Sunday night! As you drive down the streets you can see trees STILL down, waiting to be cut up and carted away. We got really lucky.

1 comment:

  1. Yikes! The boys were at camp when the storm hit and I was JUST ABOUT to go pick them up to take Roman to the pediatrician about his ear! Luckily, I delayed until the worst had past. My area didn't lose power but the entire area around the ped (including their office) did, so traffic was a MESS!

    That evening, we did the Archaeology program at Valley Forge and the weather was sooooooo gorgeous, you'd never know that there had been such a bad storm just hours before! Go figure!

    Glad you all got out of the pool and home safely! Scary!

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