More yIKEs!

Okay, I'm at work now where there is electricity, so I can quickly write a bit more while I'm waiting for the servers to reboot...

...In some ways, I blame myself for this. Saturday morning at breakfast, after watching all of the reporters from all of the stations getting blown around by Hurricane Ike, I said, "You know, I'd like to be in a hurricane once. It kind of looks like fun to stand out in the wind and hold onto your hat while stuff blows by!"

I think God gave me the smackdown yesterday!

We went to church at 11 in the morning yesterday, and as we walked into church the winds were blowing briskly, like an early April wind. "Feel that?" I told Natalie. "That's the remnants of Hurricane Ike. It's only going to get worse as the day goes along." When we left church at about 12:30 in the afternoon, the wind was about twice as strong. "Look," I told the family as we sat at a traffic light. I was pointing to a hill in the distance. "It looks like the trees are waving to us!"

"Hi!" Natalie shouted back.

So it was all good fun, until...

Natalie had Odyssey of the Mind practice from 1:30 to 2:30. I drove her to her classmate's house, where the practice was being held, and on the way back home I was amazed at the number of leaves and branches that were blowing around. At one point my view out of the windshield was almost completely obscured by leaves and branches. I got home at 1:35 and the electricity went out about a minute after I got into the house. Well, I won't be able to watch the Bengals after all, I told myself, so I jumped back in the van and headed for Florence. Meredith is going to have her birthday party in less than a month and it's going to be at a skating rink, and this particular rink does not take credit cards, so I had to physically take a check over to the rink (What century are these people living in?). As I was pulling to a stop at one traffic light there were four sets of bikers in the lane beside me (two of the bikers had biker chicks behind them on their seats). Just before I pulled up beside them a MAJOR gust of wind hit and all four bikes tumbled over in unison. If the gust had come five seconds later my van probably would have sheltered them from the wind. I jumped out of the van to see if they were okay. They were, but their bikes all had minor damage.

Once I got back from the skating rink the wind was, I think, at its worst. I was looking out the back window when the largest gust I'd seen to that point hit. Two large trees cracked like they were NOTHING! One tree struck Building Four of the museum and dented up the front gutter. The other just lost two major branches and they ended up in the yard in front of Building One. We took plenty of pictures, and I'll post them soon.

By then it was 2:30 and time to go get Natalie. We hopped in the car this time (lower profile) and headed to pick up Natalie. We then went to Lisa's Dad's house because they had power. We stayed and watched the Bengals game (What a disappointment) and then Lisa and I went out looking for food (Her dad didn't have much at his house). We started at the Fort Mitchell Kroger. Closed due to power outage. We then went to the Erlanger Kroger. Closed due to power outage. We then went to the Florence Biggs. Their power had just come back on. We got a premade salad and a couple of pizzas and headed back to her dad's house. We had dinner and went home at 8 o'clock, hoping the power would be back on. It wasn't.

We've been told that it will probably be sometime Tuesday before it's back on. I guess the food in our freezer and refrigerator will go bad. That's just how it goes, I guess. I came back into work to turn on all of the servers and see how things are going. Everything seems okay, which I consider a miracle. All told we have about 10 miles of fiber optic lines running through the city of Erlanger, and they all survived.

The servers have restarted. I'll write more later.