Our Frances Experience

It started raining after we went to bed. Maybe around midnight, or after. It was after that I remembered, oops, the dog is still out in his kennel. So we had to get out of bed and put him in his crate in the basement. We also had to shut all the windows due to mist and rain blowing in. That made the house stuffy.

So then around 4:20am I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep and feeling miserable with a nagging beginning migraine that wouldn’t go away all night, I went downstairs to the desktop pc and did a bit of surfing. My browser started crashing when I was trying to get some better radar over Georgia to come in, and IE wouldn’t work thereafter, so I had just got Firebird (mozilla) fired up and tuned to accuweather.com when PHOOWAP …. everything went BLACK.

It wasn’t very long since I’d come downstairs, the sun wasn’t up at all yet. I stumbled to the left and put my foot out for the step, and there wasn’t anything there. I had gone to far to the left and was hanging out over the steps that go down to the basement. Whoops! I didn’t fall though. Just moved over and found the right stairs and went up, where there was a tad more light to see by. It’s actually nice when the power goes out, for all the neighbors flood lights go out too. That makes our house really dark. It’ll be nice someday to live where we control the lighting.

So I got upstairs and opened Frank’s laptop, had to fiddle with it a few minutes to get it to wake up. Once it did, it said it was 5am on the nose.

Power was off for just over 2 hours. We had gotten the firestarter stick out and I lit a candle, then my kerosene lamp. I had just blown the lamp out when I had catnapped and awoke to find Frank telling me it was somewhat light out now. Within 10 or so minutes the power snapped back on, with me staring straight up at the overhead ceiling fixture, which was mysteriously “On” when it hadn’t been on when power went out. Talk about pain to a migraine sufferer!

So it’s light enough to see outside. The rain is blowing down the street, across the backyard, etc. in sheets. I don’t have a rain gauge, but I have some jars on the deck that were empty, they are all filled up.

We are gauged for expecting 4 to 8 inches or more of rain. Reports have area creeks already at bank level or overflown this morning. It’s supposed to rain all day, or off and on, or something. Frances is depressed and crying all over us. 😉

We’ve seen nor heard any lightning or thunder thus far. Just rain and gust of wind whistling forlornly.