That was a Fierce Derecho

I had never heard of a derecho and would that I had remained in my ignorance. Derecho is pronounced de-Ray-chow, or something close to that.

A derecho is a widespread, long-lived, straight-line wind storm that is associated with a fast-moving group of severe thunderstorms known as a mesoscale convective system.

It hit us around 3:30, Saturday afternoon, moving at 80mph/130kph. It only lasted for what seemed like 10 minutes, give or take, but it affected us for 76 hours from the time that power went out until it came back on again.

I had two posts in the queue for Sunday and Monday, so it probably seemed to you that I wasn't MIA, but in point of fact, I just got back to the computer last evening – Tuesday – after the power went out on Saturday afternoon.. 

After our almost-cold pizza supper (brought to us from Perth by Shauna), we received a text from Ontario Hydro advising us that we'd be without power for another two days. This was not good news, to say the least, but when I came upstairs, I saw that Alexa's lights were spinning into action. I called her name, lovingly, and she began to reply. I looked around me and rejoiced to the fans commencing their dance. 

I kind of danced too. Since I only have one good leg at the moment, I moved the other foot around and told Sue that this was the sight of one foot dancing, as in the more famous sound of one hand clapping saying.

It is rather a pity that I shortly must drag 3 heavy bags of spoiled food to the curb for our impending weekly garbage collection. Our rough estimate is that we've suffered about $250 worth of food waste. That's on top of the $150 to replace 8 roof shingles.

It could have been worse. As we drove around in the past few days, we passed houses with big trees on their roofs. Indeed, fences and trees were felled all over the place. A little outside of town, we passed a barn with its roof torn asunder.

The power outage lasted for a goodly portion of 4 separate days. Our town was hit harder than all of the surrounding towns, which pretty much had their power restored within a day or so. Perhaps I am wrong to say that the town itself was hit harder, but the route that the power lines take to get here bore very heavy damages. Apparently, up to70 poles along that power corridor to Carleton Place were knocked down, and at least one tower was toppled.

I will close for now by writing that it was quite a pleasure to awaken at 4 this morning and then be able to hit the light switch and see ... um ... light. I can't tell you how many times I have wandered into a room in the past 4 days and clicked a non-functioning light switch. Such is behavioural conditioning. 

After turning on the light, there followed a second miracle – coffee – but more about that later when I will relate about living in the blackout, but that's enough for now, for I will be off for a medical appointment in short order. Before that, though. I must gas-up the car, which is yet another thing not to be taken for granted. 

Oh yeah, and a warm shower too. It turns out that it is the little things which are really quite big things in life.