Blackout 2008

September 14, 2008 will be a day that I tell my kids about. It seemed fairly uneventful Sunday morning. The Tech Team had a pretty good morning, Vicki Gabriel was directing and she did a great job calling shots for each morning celebration. The worship team was great as usual, Dave spoke about the importance of our attitude in being Outward Focused. It seemed like a normal Sunday.

A few minutes after the 11:40 celebration ended we noticed the power strangely blinked off and on a couple of times. I had heard that showers were possible on Sunday and I assumed a thunder storm had blown up. I quickly prepared the webstreamer to encode the 11:40 celebration and left the building. I was very surprised to see that it was only a little windy out. But the longer I was outside I realized it is not just a "little windy" but it was at "Holy Crap" level. My car fought me the whole way home, trying to break free into other lanes. But as I got closer to home, the degree of the wind kept surprising me even more. I listened to a little of the Bengals game and heard that Carson Palmer was having a hard time completing passes due to the wind. I got frustrated with the Bengals, just like any other Sunday and turned it off. While I was driving down my street I was startled with all of the debris from trees, shrubs, garbage cans, birdhouses, coolers and just about anything that wasn't nailed down.

I picked up Stephanie, my wife, as we were meeting my parents and grandparents at Olive Garden to celebrate both my mother's and grandmother's birthdays. We got seated at the big party room with the huge bay window. We placed our order and got a good chuckle as we watched folks walk by our window holding hats to their heads and hold skirts down and actually saw a green baseball cap roll by at probably 30 miles and hour. And we waited to see someone chasing it, but apparently they had given up. They never passed our window. Mall road was also plainly in view and we watched the Speed limit sign twist and shake violently against the wind. Eventually, the lights inside the restaurant blinked off and on, and we began to wonder if our food would come out before the power went out. As luck would have it, as the servers began to bring out our meals, the lights went out for good. A few minutes later the manager came out to check on us and let us know that our meals were the last to come out of the kitchen that day. So we enjoyed our Italian food by the bay window.

Anyway, there is much more but I'll leave it here and blog some more about this a little later