New Year's Eve, we started having storms move in. They weren't bad, just rain and a little wind. Temps were abnormally warm, maybe 70 degrees which to me means a possibility of tornadoes especially with a cold front directly behind it. But there were no tornado warnings, so I didn't trip on it and went to bed at my usual time, 9 PM because I'm old.
Like I said, it was windy but not too bad.
Right at the stroke of midnight, the weather radio went off saying there was a severe thunderstorm warning with a possibility of tornadoes. I got up muttering something about not being in the mood for that kind of bullshit, turned off the radio and went back to sleep.
Slept in 'til about 6 AM New Year's Day. It was raining and still windy, but nothing to worry about. Later in the morning, it got darker, the rain increased and the wind seriously picked up with sustained gusts of maybe 30 mph.
About noon, that shit got serious. The sky opened up and it started getting downright breezy. About a half hour later, the wind was howling, rain was coming down in sheets and as I was standing there in the living room, I kept expecting to hear a tree come crashing down on the house. I bet our wind was blowing at 60 mph or more.
Then our power went out.
No big deal, it was still unreasonably warm, my Kindle was charged up and we had sandwich stuff to eat - we weren't going to starve nor freeze to death. Hell, it wasn't even going to be uncomfortable - matter of fact I was kinda grateful because no power meant I wasn't going to have to eat black-eyed peas that Lisa insists on fixing for New Year's Day dinner every year. I'm not a big fan of those fuckers.
The wind finally calmed down some about 2 in the afternoon, so I walked out to check on my roof, and there were deadfall branches everywhere - my yard, my neighbor's place, and a big one from my neighbor's tree partially blocking the road, which I moved into the ditch before somebody ran into it.
About 5:30 PM I figured I'd better go out and haul my generator up from the shed. If we didn't have power back on by 7, I'd fire it up for a couple hours and plug the freezer and refrigerator into it so none of our meats would defrost.
My shop generator weighs 128 pounds, so I loaded it into my lawn trailer, then hooked that up to my mower to haul it to the house and promptly got everything stuck in the mud.
Fifteen minutes after I got the mower unstuck and back in the shed, pulling the little trailer with my generator up to the back porch by hand, the power came back on. I should've brought that generator up hours ago if that's all it took.
The next morning when I took that asshole dog Jack out for his morning energy dump, I saw that I had a shitload of dead branches everywhere down at the treeline. The biggest chunk was probably 7-8 feet long and 9 inches across at the widest point, and it was good 75 feet from the tree it came off - that's how strong the wind was.
Yesterday afternoon, the temps started seriously dropping and first we got rain, then sleet right after dusk, then snow last night. This morning there was about 2 inches of snow on the ground.
I finally made it into town a couple hours ago for the first time since New Year's Eve. There were a couple large trees down, but no property damage that I could see and the talk of the town was the cause of the power outage. Depending on who I was talking to, it was either a tree smacking into a substation or a lightning strike at the same substation. And again, depending on who I was talking to, either the entire county or just half of it lost power.
Happy New Year!
