Mother Nature Ruins Best Laid Plans

 Mother Nature Ruins Best Laid Plans

Al Ritter

It’s time for my excuses. Back up to last Tuesday when my weather app was calling for locally heavy downpours but nothing extreme. I watched as the cell approached, but it didn’t show anything out of the ordinary, so I just awaited its arrival.

About 20 miles out from my house things changed on the weather, the normal red center that appears for heavy rain suddenly got replaced by a purple center and this is where things turned ugly. 4:30 PM the electric quit as winds approaching 80 mph ripped the awning from my deck like a feather in the wind. At one point BGE had claimed that sporadic tornadoes in my area had caused 150,000 customers to lose service.

I went without electric until Wednesday morning when it came back on for about 30 mins then quit again. I walked the perimeter of my property early Wednesday morning to find 3 trees from of course the neighbors’ property had fallen on my property, just more work to do!

When the electric went out for the second time one of my better neighbors called me to see if I needed to share his generator, to which I gratefully agreed. For the next 36 hours we traded off his little generator to power our refrigerators. Of course I had just gone food shopping Tuesday morning and had lots of things that would spoil.

I tried to busy myself cleaning up branches and sawing up the neighbors trees that had fallen on my side of the fence, while all the time worried more about the electricity outage. The fridge was dumping water all over the kitchen floor from the constant cooling and thawing, everything was a total mess.

So 53 hours later I once again have returned to a relatively normal life, and can return to my blog….that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!