Well, Frances did her worst, and she's not through with us yet!
Last night I was taken totally by surprise when, around 10 p.m., the lights went out. All up and down the street. Totally out. Called Duke Power and reported the outage. Their automated system said "Your power will be restored by 10:30 p.m. on August 8, 2004." 10:30? 10:30!!? That was a whole 24 hours!
Hubby was in the kitchen, or made his way there, and so did I. He had run down the batteries on our best flashlight (silly me forgot about the flashlight in my desk!) and couldn't find the butane grill lighter so we could light our big oil lamp. Fortunately, once I got there I found the butane lighter by feel and we were able to light the oil lamp and some candles. Since there really was nothing to do, we went to bed. Not easy for the night owl who's used to staying up to at least midnight. Not easy for the one who was used to having the night breezes blowing on her legs from the fan in the open window. I was tossing and turning for a totally different reason than normal.
Finally, I went out to the living room and opened one of the few windows that did open on that side of the house. It felt so much cooler there that I decided to lay on the couch. I moved a big cassette tape case. A backpack. A bunch of papers. A couple of boxes of trash bags. A cat (actually he moved himself: it was Ink Jet and I didn't see him sleeping in a dark corner so when I started to lay down on him, he scrambled out from behind my back). I lay there and scritched Cotton's head. Eventually I got sleepy and went back to bed. But not before calling Duke Power again. Their revised estimate: 2:30 a.m.
When I woke up, I was alone in bed. Hubby had gone out and slept on the couch, and when the power was turned back on at three, all the lights went on, too. Poor guy! I thought I'd turned them off, but obviously not.
Today hasn't been pouring, but there are still flood warnings out there. The Reedy River was wild to look at, very close to flooding where we drive beside it and flooded elsewhere, I know. The kids are in school, hubby is at work (we even found his pith helmet to keep him dry), and I'm trying to get the house in some semblance of order.