Bats?, Derecho wind storm, raccoons and no power!

Happy Friday everyone! 

Whew! What a week!! As my blog title implies, it has been a CRAZY week! So, let's recap....

Monday afternoon, I wrote and scheduled the last blog post for Tuesday 4. I am glad I did because the next 24 hours was CRAZY. 

Monday evening around 7:30ish, Bill and the kids were sitting at the kitchen table playing Uno. I was sitting in the living room reading something on my phone when I heard a big plop of something in our fireplace. I asked Bill to look to see what it was. I looked in and saw a clump of dirt/mud on the grate that you place logs on. So, I had Bill move the grate to see if he could get down and look up to see what it was. Well, when he took the flashlight and looked up, he saw an animal face looking down at him. He thought it was a bat, as we had been hearing squealing in the chimney off and on for a while and we had a bat in the house a while ago. He called the non-emergency police line to see if we could get a hold of animal control after hours. Well, I took the kids to Walmart while Bill dealt with the cops. They did not see a bat but suggested we block off the hole that we found. So, Bill stuffed a shirt in the hole and it was dangling in the fireplace and he filled in around with steel wool and said we would deal with it in the morning and we went to bed. 

Monday night, around 11:15 we got slammed with a huge storm with tornado like winds, rain, lightning, etc.

Radar from 1st round of storms

We lost power around 11:45ish. The lightning was something I have never seen before ever. It was consistent and constant cloud to ground.

Lightning strikes

This first round lasted about an hour and a half. Then another round with similar features started around 3ish, and then again around 4:30AM. It was insane and felt like we were living in a hurricane. On Wednesday it was confirmed that we experienced a derecho. 

According to the National Weather Service, a  derecho (pronounced similar to "deh-REY-cho") is a widespread, long-lived wind storm that is associated with a band of rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms. Although a derecho can produce destruction similar to the strength of tornadoes, the damage typically is directed in one direction along a relatively straight swath. As a result, the term "straight-line wind damage" sometimes is used to describe derecho damage. By definition, if the wind damage swath extends more than 240 miles (about 400 kilometers) and includes wind gusts of at least 58 mph (93 km/h) or greater along most of its length, then the event may be classified as a derecho. It was a wicked storm. 

Tuesday morning we awoke hot and with no power still. Tuesday was hot and humid and gross. When I came downstairs, the first thing I noticed was that the shirt that Bill had stuffed into the hole in the fireplace was gone. I texted Bill to see if he had moved it. He said no. I took the flashlight and looked up in the fireplace and saw it had been pulled up into the hole. Then I saw a grayish pointy nose stick out. Um! That would be a nope! I called animal control and couldn't get through to them. So I called the non-emergency number for the police and they came out and the officer looked into it and said it was a raccoon. Ughh. He got a hold of animal control, but because it wasn't in the house (it was up in the chimney) they wouldn't come out. He called ODNR for me and they gave him the name of 3 trappers who could come out and trap them and charge me around $400-$500 to do so. I called our landlord as we also had a roof leak from the storms the night before. He came out and said he would take care of the raccoon. He sprayed some kind of repellant up into the chimney and placed plywood in front of the fireplace opening. To try to find positives in all of this... the kids nicknamed the raccoon "Bruno" and have been singing the song "We don't talk about Bruno" from the movie Encanto. LOL 

After dealing with that, my focus turned to the storm damage. We still had no power. MOST of county was without power and there were MANY trees and lines down across the county. Amazingly, the only storm stuff we saw around our house was our recycling bin was blown over, and we had a huge branch that is hanging low to the ground in the yard next to us. There were lots of branches and leaves all over the road.

My parent's power got restored in the afternoon. Our power company couldn't give us an estimate as to when it would be back on. More than likely it was going to be a long term outage. I asked my parents if I could move the meat from our full deep freezer over to their deep freeze and if we could stay there until our power came back on. They said sure. So I loaded up all the meat from our deep freeze and took it to their house, where the kids and I stayed the night. As we were pulling into my parent's driveway, I received a text from our power company saying power restoration wasn't expected until midnight Friday night into Saturday. Uggh! 

Wednesday, we were under a high heat advisory with temperatures feeling like 110 outside with oppressive humidity. Thankfully, we hung out at mom and dads, communicated with our landlord who came to spray repellant into the chimney. My sister and her partner came to town to take their dog to the vet and they had birdhouses for the kids to paint and so it was a good day. We all had dinner together and despite the heat and stress it was a good day. Rebecca went home with my sister and Cecilia to spend the night and swim in their apartments pool. 

Late Wednesday night, we got a text that our power might be on and to text our power company if it wasn't. Well I wasn't home to check, so I texted our neighbor. She was at work, but texted me later that yes power was on as she had come home on her break to check on her dog.

Thursday, Bill had a doctor's appointment and had to get new tires put on my van. When he returned to my parents, he confirmed that power was on and that our house was cooled back down. So we headed home so I could clean out the fridge and upright freezer. We lost a lot of food in our fridge and things like French fries in our freezer, but thankfully we were able to save almost all of our meat! (We will pick it up at my parents on Father's Day to bring back home. I didn't take it home with me yesterday as we were supposed to have more severe storms that day-- thankfully we didn't.)

Today, I went to Aldi to restock our fridge and figure out dinners for the next couple nights. We are blessed that we didn't lose our meats and only needed to replace things like milk, cheeses, eggs, condiments, lunch meat, etc. It was still an expensive trip ($170+) but I am thinking how much more expensive it would have been if I had to buy all new meat. 

I am trying to find the bits of thankfulness in this week. I am thankful that no one got bit or attacked by the raccoon(s) we had in the chimney and that hopefully the problem has been taken care of. I am thankful that my parents had power and we were able to save our meat. I am thankful that our power was restored earlier than estimated. I am thankful that the damage around our house wasn't worse. I am thankful that stores have power today and I was able to get groceries. I am thankful that the kids were pretty well behaved with all the craziness and they were able to keep themselves busy. Ben was thrilled to experiment with a slinky and a flashlight! LOL 

 

So overall it was a crazy week! I was glad to be back at home in my own bed last night and I got the best sleep I had gotten all week. think the kids are happy to be home. I am hoping the next week is a little less crazy!