New York City has no power, and the milk is getting sour

(If you know the reference in the title, you and I were destined to be friends.)

Friday night I was working at my computer when I noticed the sky was getting dark and the wind was picking up.  I closed up and went downstairs to turn on the TV.  That's when I noticed the trees were bending in half and I heard our recycling bin rolling down the street.  I ran outside to retrieve it and just about got blown over myself.  Holy wow!  This was a big storm.  Right at 6:00pm, I turned on the news to see how bad of a storm it was and BAM! our electricity went out.  I tried to turn on I Heart Radio on my phone and had no network.  Dave was still at work.  Sloopy (my dog) and I just sat and waited to hear the emergency sirens.  There were some HUGE cracks of thunder and lightning.  Somewhere between 6:30 and 6:45 Dave called and said Hamilton Road was closed and that he would have to take a different route to get home.  By 7:00pm he was home and we still had no power.

We had dinner at my parents' house and headed home after that.  On our drive home we noticed NO ONE had power as we got closer and closer to home.  And we, of course, didn't have power either.  I didn't sleep very well that night as the temperature rose in the house and our smoke detector beeped all night.  I finally got up around 4:30am in a panic because (a) we still didn't have power and (b) our photo booth for Saturday's wedding was across the street in our storage facility behind an ELECTRONIC GATE!!!  With nothing I could do until the office would be open I headed out on my long run just before 6:00am.

(More on the long run in the next post.)

We returned around 9:00am and I called the storage facility to no avail.  Luckily, it's a chain and I was able to call a different one in town and was able to get information.  Without even showering, Dave and I hopped on our bikes and rode over to the location.  And what we saw on our way there was like nothing I had ever seen before.  It looked like an apocalyptic movie:

Yep, that's less than a quarter mile from our house.  Supposedly the wind took down 12-15 electrical poles and trapped 20-25 cars underneath all those wires.  One car was smashed by one of the poles and severed a man's foot.  Those people were trapped in their cars for upwards of 5 hours.  Saturday morning the cars were gone, but a lot of damage remained.  We were not getting power any time soon.

So, we packed up a few things, including as many refrigerated and freezer items as we could, and headed to mom and dad's for the day.  We were fortune enough to be able to get our photo booth and the venue where we were working had power.  We spent the night at my parents' house Saturday night.  We were also able to hear from our electric company that the estimate for getting our power back would be NEXT Saturday, July 7th.  Holy wow!

Sunday morning we headed back to our neighborhood to drop off the photo booth and obviously, still did not have power.  Our poor neighbors who had nowhere to go!  We checked out the damage again and although it looked better, there was still a long way to go:

We were able to talk to a cameraman for the local TV station, who just happened to have worked for the power company in a previous career.  He said that this was really a three week job but that they were bringing in resources from other states.  Wow!  Honestly I'll be surprised if we get power by next weekend.  For now we're staying at my parents' house and making the best of what we've got.