Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Big puddles, no power

Living in Tucson, it is not common to have thunderstorms in October. And, it's also not common to have middle of the night storms. Both of these situations occurred early this morning.

Anthony always wakes me during the night when any unusual thing happens. By thing, I'm referring to events like Lucky throwing up, strange noises outside or in the house, me snoring loudly (I suppose that could be lumped into strange noises), and every time there has ever been a power outage during the night he always wakes me up.

At first, I am always annoyed about being awakened. But, once I am awake I'm grateful he thinks of me as being helpful in some way when these events occur. The only thing that sucks is that I usually end up losing about an hour's sleep (or more) when it happens. There is nothing fun about cleaning up dog puke in the middle of the night or trying to come up with some creative answer response to Anthony when he says "Why is the power out? Can you make it come back on? Why is this happening to us? Are we going to die? I don't like it."

There was a powerful storm that rolled through the Tucson metro at about 4 a.m. this morning. The thunder was quite loud, it rained really hard, and it knocked the power out to over 2,000 homes in the east / midtown area including our neighborhood. I'm ready for such events with multiple flashlights at the ready and two alarm clocks - one that is on house power, the other battery operated. If the power goes out even briefly, I'll still have one that goes off at the right time so I'm not late for work. And, a flashlight so I can stumble my way across the house to my bathroom so I can pee... since that is the first thing I always have to do when I wake up.

Anthony woke me moments before the power went out. It was out for over an hour, although I fell back asleep after about thirty minutes of checking on Twitter and listening to the strong storm outside. Poor Lucky, he hates noisy storms and disappeared to the other side of the house to hide in a bathroom.

We're supposed to have more normal weather (sunny, 80+ degrees) in the next few days. Hopefully the power stays on during the night the rest of the week. I'm really tired from having a short interrupted night. I need my beauty sleep, I'm too darned ugly to miss any.

Big puddle in our driveway
after the big thunderstorm.
We will rebuild.


Big puddle in the parking
lot at the TV station.
We will rebuild.