A Bit Windy

Tuesday a storm blew through Provo. It lasted 15 minutes but oh, the impact.

This is the view from our back door just minutes after the wind and rain hit.

For those of you who aren't sure what our yard normally looks like, there isn't usually powerlines on the ground and there used to be a fence and a cherry tree standing between the 2 sheds.

The crash was incredible. It was so loud that we thought it had landed on our house. Here's the culprit:

Apparently, the tree has been dead for years and was just rotted enough to topple. Notice how it landed inches from our shed. And notice how every powerline that connects to our house is under that tree.

It yanked on the lines so hard that it broke the power pole in our neighbor's yard. You can see the top half of the pole laying on their fence.

What all of this means is that we knew we'd be without power, internet, and phone for a while. Too bad it didn't knock out a main power hub because you know we'd be first on the fix-it list. We were told it could be up to 4 days before they'd be out to re-string the lines. We asked our neighbors if we could use and extension cord and plug our refrigerator into one of their outlets and they were very accommodating. We spent the night with power to our fridge only but thanks to Bryson, we have a few solar-powered LEDs (night lights) strategically placed around the house so it wasn't too dark.

Lucky for us Provo Power came out that night (2 a.m.) and got us connected again. We found out later that the power pole took out power to 4 houses on the block and unfortunately for them, it was much longer before that was fixed.

Needless to say, we may have power but our internet connection (which means phone line too) still isn't first on the priority list for the city. They have to re-string the fiber lines behind our house and apparently the other thousands of houses without power are still the priority. That means that for now we are pirating our internet wirelessly from some poor guy who doesn't have the common sense to secure his internet. Caleb worked on it for a long time and miraculously got our router configured somehow to give us very unreliable phone service. It is like a really bad cell phone but it is better than nothing. The place we get the best internet reception is right at one of our windows, hence the next picture:

We're not out of the woods yet but at least I can keep my A/C running!