We had some big winds yesterday (still going pretty good this morning too). At work, we had several power flickers at work around noon. Shortly thereafter, a gal who lives in Francestown, a town abutting Deering, emailed me that Francestown's power was out (her husband had called her on a cell phone) and asked about ours. I called home and the answering machine picked up, so I knew at that point we had power.
Then at 2:40 , the power at work went went completely out. I didn't mind too much. I had planned on getting out at 2 (by noon I had 45 hours in), but at 1:15 someone brought me a pile of work that needed to be done. I got it all done except 2 things when the power failure hit. I figured that was a message from God and got out about 2:50 (power still wasn't restored).
The traffic lights at the closest intersection weren't working, but everyone seemed to be playing nice (there wasn't too much traffic yet anyway). The next set of lights, about 4 miles away, were working, so at least the whole town of Hollis wasn't affected.
On my drive home, I had to stop once because the road was down to one lane. A tree hadn't so much fallen as it was leaning precariously over the other lane, and only about 10 feet above the road. Another road had a detour while crews were doing electrical work.
I stopped at the Deering General store to get some PowerBall tickets and asked the gal at the counter if they had had power flickers. She said that they had just gotten power back.
When I got home and had parked in the driveway, I walked back down to the street and threw several large branches out of the road. On getting my stuff out of the truck, I found a huge scratch down the passengers door (it either happened at work or while I was driving home) and heard trees cracking all around me as another huge gust came barreling thru (it was neat hearing the gust get closer and closer before it finally hit).
When I walked in, I found that we had lost power. I started the woodstove (the sun had been keeping the house warm before that) and sat down to peruse the mail and the Reader's Digest. As it got darker, I gathered up the hurricane lamps, filled them with oil and got them lit. As I was doing that, WS came inside and started chuckling. Evidently he had just thought that we needed to get the lamps started soon (great married-for-20-years minds think alike). We also got some candles going.
We had just decided that we were all set for the evening (except for water but we could get some from the stream out back, the stream up the hill, or the stream down the hill) when I started laughing. WS asked what was so funny.
We were standing in the kitchen, me by the refrigerator; I heard the compressor start up.
The power had come back on.
"Flinged"??? [From the article that you linked to: "“It more or less picked (the roof) up like a parachute and flinged it into the street,” said Ron Lavoie, owner and manager of Eastern Auto Body, located across the street."] Either Mr Lavoie is from our neck of the woods, where few are taught to speak the language, or a typesetter had the power cord wrapped around his/her neck!
Glad all is well with you and WS. Those winds aren't fun at low temperatures! We are cool, but not much wind, so are doing fine.
Posted by: Cop Car | February 18, 2006 at 08:42 AM
isnt that just typical!
Posted by: Bod | February 18, 2006 at 11:10 AM
CC - they were quoting the guy, which probably means he did say "flinged" instead of "flung". Around here we make up words as we go along!
Posted by: bogie | February 19, 2006 at 06:22 AM
Making up new words is how the language gets expanded. Personally, I would just as soon that all of our verbs were changed to the regular form (fling, flinged, flinged). This stuff of see, saw, seen, think, thought, thought, and am, was, been is for the birds (bird, birded, birded)!!
Posted by: Cop Car | February 19, 2006 at 10:29 AM
I am confuse, confused, confusedest from all this "I thought I seen a flinged birded" stuff.
Glad you are no longer in the dark Bogie. Not too sure about the rest of us though.
Posted by: Wichi Dude | February 19, 2006 at 02:10 PM
WD - All I can think of is Tweety Bird saying that now.
Posted by: bogie | February 20, 2006 at 07:09 AM