Goodness Gracious Great Balls of Fire

I try to make time for blogging but, sometimes, my time is not my own. I've had a lot of things to do lately so although I have posts in mind and a lot of photos which scream "Blog about me!", that's as far as it gets. And then Mother Nature tosses a curve ball and, well, I think it was John Lennon who said, "Life is what happens when you were making other plans."

I had to go into the city very early last Thursday. We had a huge job which I needed to help do installations on. It was really cool in the city, and I don't mean temperature, although that hovered around 62 degrees. The fog off the lake was thick, like cotton. I love fog. I have photos. I'll get around to posting them.

Anyway, there was a phone call about a meeting Thursday night for this society to which my company belongs. My boss sighed and asked if I would go. He was too tired and he's got a 3 year-old who is being, well, a 3 year-old. Sure. It's overtime.

We've been going through a period of unstable air. It doesn't feel humid but the air is coming from the Gulf of Mexico and mixing with cool, dry Canadian air and we're seeing a lot of rain and thunderstorms. I kind of forced the meeting to break up when the setting sun suddenly disappeared behind a wall of blue black. I wanted to be home. Pilchard hates storms so I really wanted to be there for her. I managed to get home about 10 minutes after the line came through. Plus, I had been up since 5 a.m. I was tired and driving in a pounding rain was not my idea of fun. I got soaked running from the car to the house, but no matter. I was home.

The storm lasted about 30 minutes. I gave it another 10 minutes and logged onto the Internet and into World of Warcraft. I had a nice conversation with guild members until the corner of my left eye registered flashes. Uh oh. Another line of storms was coming. I decided the better part of valor was turning off the computer while this next wave passed.

The computer was off. I turned to my left to turn off the floor lamp. I have a lovely view of my backyard from my home office windows. Suddenly, there was a blue-white ball of light in the middle of my back yard. It had a band on the top that was snow white and a band around the bottom that was blood red. The rest of it was a swirling blue white. It looked like Sauron's eye, without the eye part, or a portal that you'll see in a video game. There was a sound with it like the sound of that firework which will be shot into the air before fireworks to let people know the show will start soon. I think it's an M80. It shook my house. It was all over in a split second. I can still see that swirling blue ball in my memory. It was about 3-5 feet in diameter.

My house never lost power, it didn't even blink. The neighbors behind me, however, lost power. In fact that whole west side of my block was without power after this. The flash was so bright, the street lights on either side of me went out. They came back in about 5 minutes.

I just sat here, blinking at the back yard. I thought to myself, "Ohhhh....kay. I'm just gonna go read a book." I turned off all the lights except the bedroom light, grabbed my book and read 3 more chapters before calling it a night. In the morning, I went into the back yard. No sign of anything scorched, nothing. I was pretty sure it had been ball lightning, but I was very surprised there was no sign of any scorching.

Friday, I come home from work and try to log onto the Internet. Nothing. I realize that my modem/router has no lights on it. The phone runs through the router so I have no phone either. Mike, the nice guy from AT&T who helped me was thrilled with my story. He is writing a book about lightning and said it was ball lightning. I called the meteorology department at College of DuPage and the student I talked to said it sure sounded like ball lightning. It doesn't usually leave scorch marks, either. It's a spot of concentrated electrical energy released. Well, this is all nice, but I want my phone and Internet back. AT&T would have someone out on Sunday.

Joe came out on Sunday. Step one is to make sure the signal is getting to the box. Because wasps like to nest in the boxes, he opened it up very carefully.

Looks pretty normal, doesn't it? This is what we saw when he opened it up.

Lightning had traveled down the phone line and into the box, completely frying the contents. It's charred. The wires inside are all fused together. The box acted like a ground, however, and the energy never went into the house. The modem/router took a surge and the power supply was toasted, but my phone, my computer, my TV, my electrical is all good. There is also no fire or scorch marks inside. I have had my miracle for this year and I'll take it. He jokingly said, "A new router isn't going to connect you to the Internet." Ya think?

The problem was that the pole where the phone line comes off was energized or "hot". Com Ed, our highly responsive electric company, and yes, that is sarcasm, needed to come deenergize the pole before AT&T could climb it. I was going to need a complete new line from the pole to the house, as well as a new box and he felt they should just string a new line to the office. He said I'd probably need a new modem/router, just to be safe. But, there was nothing he could do on Sunday until the pole was deenergized. He put in a ticket, took some photos, and we began the waiting game.

This morning, when I still didn't have phone or Internet I gave AT&T a call. Customer service was very apologetic. She couldn't see the status of my ticket, but she gave me a $35 credit because of lost service and a $25 Visa gift card. That will buy a number of lunches. She also said, "You don't have line insurance. I know it's at your discretion, but if they are telling you they need to string new line, you need to get this insurance. It's $6 a month and it means that if any line needs to be replaced, we do it for free. Otherwise, you're paying $93 an hour for the tech to be there. I'll make it retroactive to Thursday, when the lightning hit." I usually get upset when something is pushed like that but knowing that I would have to have a new line, I jumped on getting that. I can always call and cancel it, but it will have saved me a lot of money.

I called tech support and they had not heard from Com Ed. Also, my ticket was not expedited so that a tech would check on the line on Monday. So, the guy did that and Sherwade was at my house today at 8:45. Com Ed had done their part so he strung a new line to the house, installed a new box and ran a line directly to the office. No going through the basement with a phone line. He was at the house for 90 minutes. At $93 an hour, that would have been a bank breaker. It won't cost me a thing.

In a case of "some days you're the pigeon and some days you're the statue", the tech had finished everything, cleaned up and had just pulled away from the curb and ... the power went out. Seriously. I thought about running after him waving like a maniac, but, instead, I called Com Ed. As I was explaining to the gal what had happened, she said, "Oh ma'am. I see that 1700 people around you are without power. It's not AT&T or you." According to the flashing on the clock in the bedroom, power was restored about 45 minutes after I left for work.

Here's the new box. The tech said it's less wasp permeable. The brown on the siding is from the lightning. My vinyl siding probably helped prevent a fire, too.

I missed an eye appointment because I couldn't get the voice mail notice and I didn't know how to get my voice mails by calling in from another location. (It's also my fault for losing the card on which the time was written and not calling the clinic to verify the appointment.) I spent the weekend and the first 2 days of this week reading, cleaning, writing a letter that I discovered I couldn't print because my printer is hooked up, wirelessly, to the computer through ... the dead modem. /sigh I also finished the stitching on a wedding present. Now to finish the sewing on said present. I also cleaned. There is value to being without this modern contraption.

The tech said today that this end of spring beginning of summer has been horribly rough on phone and Internet. "We'd rather be out doing installations. Instead, we're climbing poles and doing repairs." I guess it's the price we pay for living in the Midwest.

So, I'm back. I have a lot of blog posts to get done. I will say that "Brave" looks really good when played on my computer. The only bad part is that I don't have space in my lap for Pilchard when I watch a movie on the computer. (Oh yeah. My TV is dying, too.)

Beverage:  Water

Deb

We're Okay

To say there was "a little weather" in Chicagoland yesterday is a profound understatement. When I went to bed on Saturday night, I was aware we were to have rain, potentially heavy, on Sunday. Around midnight, the weather service changed our "moderate" risk to "high risk" of damaging winds and hail, heavy rains and the potential for tornadoes. I didn't hear any of that.

Sunday, I decided to bring in the deck chairs, finally. I opened the back door and, whoa. The temperatures were hovering around 70 degrees, in mid-November, in Chicagoland. It was so nice, I decided to bring in a chair and then grab my next scarf project and sit on the deck. The sky was heavily overcast so I knew any enjoyment of the mild air would be fleeting.

By the time I collected the next skein of yarn and made it to the back door, it was raining. It was a spotty shower but contained lightning and thunder. I logged onto the computer to check the weather. It was 11:45. The first tornado of the day had hit Washington, Illinois, a suburb of Peoria, a good 2 hour drive south of me.

Concerned, because there was a tornado watch issued for me, I turned on the television. NBC, Channel 5, came up since I'd watched them the last time I'd watched TV. They had graphics and drawings and 3D models. They had been on the air; on the air; since 10:30 a.m. watching this storm. They had red and orange and purple and yellow images. I haven't seen that much of those colors since the psychedelic 1960's. They had charts and arrows and models showing tornadic rotation, all of it heading toward Chicago. I watched, sitting snugly in my recliner. At 12:10, NBC announced another tornado, spawned from the same cell that had passed over Washington, Illinois, was on the ground south of Chicago. It was moving north northeast. The storm track took it well south of Wheaton.

At 12:15, a large cell of this storm line passed over me and started pouring rain. You couldn't see across the street. The lightning was nearly constant for about 5 minutes and the wind made all the trees in the yard groan. But, as quickly as it hit, it passed.

That's what was quite amazing to me, how fast this whole system blasted through Chicagoland. It was moving at 55 to 60 miles per hour.

I turned to Channel 2, CBS, to check on the Bears' football game. There was nothing going on at Soldier Field other than the Baltimore Ravens were leading, 20 minutes into the game, 10 to nothing. Ah yes. It's just another sorry football game in the life of a Bears fan. Normally, I wouldn't care about the Bears but I was curious about the weather in Chicago. They cut away for a commercial and the Channel 2 meteorologist came on screen with updates.

This projected track, the red box, took the storm dangerously close to downtown Chicago and Soldier Field, where there was a football game in progress. My location is in the center of the box, which is the outline of the county where I live, where the "12:00 PM" ends. I wasn't going to be affected by this cell. I would have to deal with heavy rain.

When they cut back to the game, the evacuation order had been given to get people out of the stands as lightning had hit a skyscraper in visible proximity to Soldier Field.

I don't remember the last time I saw a pro football game in Chicago suspended for weather. Baseball gets this all the time, and high school foot ball games can find themselves, in those early season late August and early September Friday night games, running afoul of thunderstorms, but not the Bears. Then they panned the camera skyward.

That's not what went over me. I realized that the cell that went over me had moved, as the whole line of storms moved, north northeast. These clouds were the advance wave of what was in that above red box. I've sat through my share of downpours, sleet, and snow at Iowa football games but there is no way anyone should be in the stands at any event when the threat of severe weather with lightning, hail and high winds are incoming.

For the next 2 hours, the news told of tornadoes destroying sections of towns, perhaps even whole small towns in eastern Illinois. I watched as the rain and wind pounded Soldier Field. At one point, you couldn't see across the field, it was raining so hard. News reports were coming in of tornadoes reported in the south suburbs but it was moving east, more than north. By 2:30 p.m., I had sunshine. The first band of storms well to the east and moving out across Lake Michigan and into Michigan.

Another, smaller, band of showers came through around 4. It was accompanied by extremely high straight-line winds and the cold front arrived around 8. It had been 68 at 11. It was 43 by 8 p.m.

The girls started the adventure with me, Pilchard in my lap and Mija next to me on the recliner. But the thunder scared them so that they found more comfort just sleeping on shirts I left on my bed. I would get up, every 15 minutes or so, and check on them, but they stayed there through the whole afternoon. When the winds picked up, around 4, the power started to flicker, dim and finally went out completely. It would be out for a minute or two and come back on. I'd fix the time on the microwave only to have the power go out. I was also trying to cook supper so I really needed some time without the flickering. I quit fixing the time (in fact, I think it's still wrong) and got supper cooked when the power went out for a good 45 minutes. I wound up eating spaghetti and meatballs in the dark.

Rooting in the closet, I found my flashlight, propped it up on the back of the recliner and spent the time after supper crocheting the next scarf.

Between watching the news and crocheting by flashlight, I got a lot done on this particular scarf. The power came back on for good about 20 after 6.

The devastation is terrible. The stories of survival are incredible. While the latest tornado on record in Chicago is December 4, 1957, and there is a potential for this kind of weather any month of the year, you can't tell me there's not something to climate change. It shouldn't be 70 degrees in November in the Midwest, maybe in Louisiana or Arkansas, but not Chicago. We should be thinking that 50 is balmy at this time of year.

I have some small branches to clean up is all. We're okay. My heart aches for those who lost everything with Thanksgiving only 10 days away.

Beverage:  Irish Breakfast tea

Deb

When The Power Goes Out

I was sitting in my recliner last night. A load of towels had just finished washing and supper, a frozen dinner, was cooking in the microwave. Suddenly, the microwave stops. Oh good grief. I need to buy a new microwave? It takes me a few minutes to realize, there are no lights which is a good indication of no power. Well, what do I do now? I put the dinner back in the freezer, since it was only partially cooked. I hung up the towels and made myself a couple of peanut butter sandwiches. Hey! I can cross-stitch.

I took my project into the office where the west facing windows allow lots of evening sunshine to stream in. I was able to work on the project for another hour and a half before it got too dark to see the crosses.

I've stitched up the right side as high as the picture will be. I'll be able to finish all except the bottom green without moving the hoop. I like that. It can be really hard to get a hoop mark out of material when it's left in for awhile.

The power came back on at 8. I wrote a few letters in the gloaming before the power came back on. There is something peaceful about being off the grid even if my first response was, "NOOOOO!"

Beverage:  Huckleberry tea

Deb

Well What Do You Know

Sunday evening, the power went out, three times. The last time was around 1 in the morning. Now, I have a lot of understanding friends, but I figured that calling them at 1 in the morning to say, "My power is out. Can you call me at 6 to make sure I'm up?" would not be appreciated.

The last time the power went out, the guys in the office asked why I didn't use the alarm clock application on my cell phone. That's easy for them to say. They are running around with "smart" phones; Droids or iPhones; that clearly have alarm clock features. My phone makes and receives calls. That's all it does. Supposedly, I have Internet access but it's in a text format. You try finding out the Iowa-Northwestern football score via that.

I called Com Ed and put in an "out of service" notice. I was informed that my outage had been registered and it would be around 3 a.m. before the power would be restored. I needed sleep. How would I get up in the morning without an alarm clock? Well, let's look at the phone.

By golly, I do have an alarm clock feature. The power wound up coming back on around 5. My phone went off at 6. I far prefer waking up to the melodious sounds of jazz but a ringing cell phone does get your attention.

It's good to know I have this capability on my phone. Now I have to remember to keep it charged.

Beverage:  Edinburgh's Finest tea

Deb