Something Else

PREFACE: The word �suck� is one of those words that can take on a couple different meanings. One meaning can be of a very positive light, with several delightful subdivisions unto itself... and then there's also a meaning that connotes something very bad is going on, as well... Sadly, this is one of those stories in which the word "suck" reaches whole new levels of �bad.�

So... Big ice storm... not a little minor thing... insanely major... 30,000 houses without power kind of major, see? Pants-poopingly major... I, personally in my nearly thirty-four years of existence, have never seen anything remotely like it. HERE are some images from the city website... I personally think they vastly understate the damage that I personally saw (and am still seeing) within just a few blocks of my house (as best as I can tell, they look like images from a couple different places out in the more rural areas). When I can find the software to get the pics I took from the digital camera, I'll post them, as well... I think they're much more telling of the carnage (at least in a personal manner, anyway). I will now attempt to recount my ordeal as best I can for you here (yeah, it's pretty long, but it was a pretty long and intesne ordeal - so, why don't you do yourself a favor and bookmark the post and take a few days to read it all if you have to):

Friday, February 14, 2003
St. Valentine's Day... After a week of snow, cold, snow, thaw, a little more snow, and a nearly compete thaw, Friday brings us 40� temperatures and rain starting at about noon... It's nasty out, I want no part of it, at all, and end up falling asleep for the night at about 9:30pm. Pathetic, I know, but that's how it goes, sometimes.

Saturday, February 15, 2003
I wake up about 6:30am (thanks to falling asleep so early the night before). Still raining, still grey as can be and basically nasty. I check the Weather Channel in between some Boomerang and I see where they are calling for the rain to start to freeze up after the sun goes down... hooray... I grab a guitar and proceed to fidget around on it for the next couple hours, recording a few bizarre odd-meter, open-tuning ditties (inspired by the seriously silly movie, �Overdrawn at the Memory Bank� (a really early Raoul Julia flick produced by New York Public Television) that is on Mystery Science Theater 3000) into a little digital flash memory recorder I have.
About noon, I call my friend Mike and tell him about the strange movie I just watched and suggest that we go get some lunch... so about an hour later he comes and gets me and we go through Wendy's... they actually get BOTH of our orders right the first time (they have an uncanny knack for fucking up orders every time you go there in some fashion or another). �Hey maybe the gods are with us, today,� I think to myself, revelling at the fact that I didn't have to go back through and get my side order of cheese or the fries that they forgot to put in the bag... (note: famous last words)
SO we go back to Mike's and chow. Afterwards, we spend the next couple hours checking out the newest expansion of Ultima Online. I used to play the game, but I got kinda put off by the tedium... Anyhow, I still like to watch stuff going on in the game when I have a chance, and Mike was taking me around to all the new gigungous houses he and two other friends had just built in the new land expansion. Seriously impressive stuff, especially Steve's (the �veteran� of the group), complete with a battle arena on the rooftop for people to gather and compete in a �Friday Night Fights� thing and stuff like that...
So after we run around in UO world, I suggest we go to Sam Goody. After all, there's always a CD waiting to be added to the collection. So we head out. There's a fine sheen of ice starting to show on the trees in the area, but the roads are fine to and from Sam Goody. We go back to his house and gather up the crap I had left there and we head to my house. It's about 9:15pm. To get to my house from Mike's, there's two ways you can go. You can either go around �the boulevard� to the east or you can cut over the hill that houses the city's reservoir. The roads were okay when we got home from Sam Goody so we really don't think anything of going over the reservoir... umm... oops... When you get to the top of the hill, the road curves left. When we reached the top of the hill and attempted to make the left, the truck just basically went straight, instead... and made a beeline for a big guard rail. At the last possible second, the truck regains traction, swings hard to the left and we avert smacking the snot out of the gurad rail by mere inches... my comment to him was, �I could have stuck my tongue out the window and licked it, we came that close to it...� Collective breath-catching and a bit of a nervous chuckle later, I arrive home.
My neighborhood consists of three streets on a hillside surrounded on three sides by one of a few legit �forests� inside the city limits. You can have a better look HERE, if you like. In the winter, when all the trees have shed for the season, there's an incredible view of the city from my house, clear across the Ohio River to the Kentucky hillside. I thought I should fill you in on that for the rest of the story...
It continues to sleet and freezing rain and all that great stuff. I get online and reply to a couple emails waiting in my mailbox. I can hear the sleety stuff hitting my windows now at an accelerated pace. Things are clearly not improving outside, at all... I continue to surf around the net, thinking, �Well, it has to end sometime... doesn't it?�
About 10:30pm, the phone rings. It's someone who we'll call Extremely-important Person, or EP for short. EP is many, many miles away, safe at school. I inform her of the current situation and the near accident on the way home. As we continue talking, I can hear the freezy shit getting heavier... We continue our conversation, with me doing my best not to notice the weather... Then, at about 11:45pm, it happens... �PLOINK!� Out go the lights. Fortunately, they immediately come back on. Being on a cordless phone at the time, I lost communication with EP for a moment. When everything is cool again, I tell her that the lights have just flickered off and on and apologize for the brief loss of the phone. About five minutes later, �PLOINK!� again, and a very distant �KAPOW!� of a transformer popping, and the lights go out and immediately return for a second time. Seeing as it's the second time it's happened (and subsequently, the second time the computer I was sitting by had to go through the whole ScanDisk crapola), I decide it's probably for the best to shut the computer down for the night. About three or four minutes later, �PLOINK!� (�KAPOW!�) again... This time, the lights do not come back on... they tried to, about three or four times, but no luck... in the meantime, I have lost commuinication completely with EP, this time... I know that she will call back when she realizes I didn't come back, and make my way down the pitch-ass black stairs through the pitch-ass black living room to the corded phone in the kitchen. I inform EP of the situation, kick back in the La-Z-Boy, and we resume our conversation... no big deal... I've had the power go out on me before. It'll be cool.
Sure enough, about 1:30am, the light in the kitchen informs me that power has, indeed, been restored to the neighborhood... that wasn't so bad, at all. I can still hear it raining and such, but hey - we've got power back. EP and I finish our conversation for the evening and I make it upstairs in time to watch South Park at 2am, relieved that the power is back on and rather tired from being up so long. After South Park, I switch it over to SciFi, where a cheesy horror-esque movie is just starting... Well, I'm in one of those �the cheesier, the better� kind of moods. Sitting up on my bed, I finally start to give in to the fact that I'm really tired, and I begin to nod off... catching myself as I do so the first few times, continuing to ingest the cheese on my tv screen... I quickly nod off again - this time waking up to darkness... I have no idea how much time has passed, what time it is or anything - my watch is across the room and I don't feel like knocking over a huge stack of CDs in my floor to see what time it is, 'cause I couldn't really care less. �Shit,� I think. �Fucking power's out again...� About the time I get up to take of my clothes and actually get into bed, the power clicks back on. �Good deal,� I think and crawl under the covers for the night...

Sunday, February 16, 2003
10:00am - I pull the covers off my head and greet the morning with a yawn and a squint... one of the first things I realize as I come out of my haze is that it's still sleety-freezy-shitting outside. This is starting to suck... An oatmeal bar and a glass of orange-pineapple-banana juice later, I'm playing my guitar. Quickly realizing that nothing productive is happening, I put the guitar back in the case and flip around the channels... Nothing good there, either.
12:00 noon - I switch it over to FOX to see if the Daytona 500 is going to get rained out or what (the Weather Channel clued me in to some inclement weather down that way, too). About five minutes into the broadcast... yes, you guessed it... �PLOINK!� (�KAPOW!�)... �Shit!� I wait... I wait a little longer... nothing... Looking outside, the snowplows that went up and down the hill did their job pretty well - my street is very clean, considering the foul weather that hasn't stopped since Friday. In the silence, I can hear more �KAPOWs� from tranformers all over town popping... Something else I'm hearing more and more, too. The cracking of tree limbs as they snap off of trees from the ever-growing weight of the ice that is building up on them... Some of them make such a sound, you would swear someone is cranking off shots from a 30-06 rifle. �Okay, this is definitely not getting any better...�
I go out, clear the inch of "pre-Slushee" (without the syrup) off of my porch porch and have a look around. It generally pretty nasty out, but more specifically, it's really nasty out. Trees are starting to droop a bit more significantly, now. Starting to get hungry, so I go in to order some Chinese. I'm standing in the sunroom at the back of the house, looking down the hill and just as I hang up the phone I see a tree come teetering over out of the woods about four houses down... Not a branch from a tree, and entire tree about 18" in diameter... It rips through the power line on the poles out back, literally unearthing one pole, which comes to rest against a garage... If it hadn't been for the fact that the cable company put in new cable about 18 months ago on brand new, super-heavy-duty strand, the tree would have totally blasted the back of the neighbor's house... as it was, there was damage, but not what it could have been... I came shooting out of the house and down the hill to see if everything is okay (it's obviously not). After looking over the damage to the power lines, poles, etc., I slowly start to realize that we're not going to have power back on the hill anytime soon... not a very comforting thought...
The power company says they'll have everything under control in 24 to 36 hours (should I start holding my breath?). This, of course, is of little comfort to me, whose worst experience with power loss was probably when it was about 105� outside one summer and we lost power for about three hours in the afternoon. Meanwhile back in the real world, it's still extremely shitty out and only getting shittier...
The sounds of the �rifle fire� are getting much more frequent, now (it seems like there was a decent-sized �CRACK!� about once a minute), and it's honestly starting to unnerve me, a bit. So I figure the best thing for me to do is to grab some CDs and some batteries for the Walkman and do what I can to not worry about it for the moment. After all, I can't do anyting about any of it while there's still ice continuing to form on the trees and they're breaking in-two everywhere... So I grab my Walkman, grab a few CDs (including the ones I bought at Sam Goody last night that I haven't had a chance to listen to, yet)... open the drawer of my desk to grab the spare AA batteries... searching... searching... searching... "a ha... there they a- AAAs??? Huh??? SHIT!!!� So much for that �the gods smiling on us� nonsense I was thinking yesterday. Well, I absolutely cannot sit there and listen to nothing but the trees breaking apart outside. I'll break apart, myself... Considering that my car is broken (and even if it weren't, it's handily blocked in by my wilting birch tree), there's only one thing to do...
I strap on my boots and head for the carry out about ten blocks away... When I get there, I can see the big "CLOSED" sign in the window... "Yippee..." The only other choice is to walk to the Super Quik about three miles away by Mike's house... Ack... but I've got no choice... it's either that or back home to the silence... I grab my cellphone and call Mike and tell him that I'm heading his direction and will probably stop by and thaw for a few on my way to the Super Quik. On the way, I am passed by a formerly very, very close friend... not once, but twice on the way to Mike's in about a fifteen minute time span... It's not that we had some kind of falling out or anything, he just convinced my girlfriend to leave me and marry him about six or seven years ago. So I wasn't really expecting him to stop or anything, but still, if I had seen him trudging through the shit, I have no doubt I would have stopped and picked him up in a heartbeat... I guess I should maybe rethink my kindness to assholes in the future. About a 1/4 mile from Mike's I see a guy come walking up the boulevard. As he gets a little closer, I can see he's toting a 12-pack of Busch Light... �Mmmm... yummy swill.� I almost stopped in my tracks when I saw what I saw next... the guy is totally hitting a hooter... and not, even, like, hiding it, or trying to hit it like a cigarette, but, y'know, toking on it, walking down the street in broad daylight. I guess I need to stop being surprised at how ignorant people are, anymore.
Anyhow, I get to Mike's and get warm. While I'm there, I hear the weathrfolks say it should be in the mid 40s tomorrow and the mid 50s on Tuesday... "Well, at least it will thaw out..." (note: more famous last words)
So I leave there and go to SuperQuik... There's about 50 people in line at the kerosene pump... I think to myself that I'd almost rather be cold than sit and huff burning kerosene fumes - it tends to make me (and others) quite ill-feeling.
6:15pm - Back home (finally). Stuff is really nasty out, now... I go down to Mrs. Bays' house to check on her. She's lived alone for a while, now, and after seeing a tree limb bigger around than my leg pirced through her carport and sever others of comparable girth laying in her front yard and strewn about, I figure she's probably freaking out in her basement or something (and probably rightfully so). After seeing that she's okay, I come inside and basically collapse... but not before I slap my batteries that I trudged though the shit for in to my Walkman and fall asleep listening to King Crimson... at last, a minor bit of relaxation...
Sleep kinda comes and goes throughout the night... one thing kinda sticks out... Every time a song ends, in that little silence in between songs, without fail - �CRACK!�... damn...
Another late-night call with EP proves a bit settling. There are tree limbs falling all over the place at this point, but the sound of her voice is rather soothing among the chaos... as soon as we hang up, though, it's back to the realization that there are some mighty big, OLD trees that just so happen to have a bead right on my bedroom should they decide to give way... In particular, Where my bed is in my room and where I lay on my bed, I open my eyes and behold a GREAT BIG tree that just is aching to fall over and has been for the better part of about ten years. So... I just need to keep my eyes closed and concentrate on the music and being any kind of warmer...

Monday, February 17, 2003
After a pretty restless night (I actually fell asleep for good at about 6:00am), I wake up around 10:00am... The little battery-powered radio tells me that not only are most of the radio stations in town off the air, but the one station that is still on is reporting 30,000 homes in the area are without power... yikes... "This sucks." Since the water pumps are electric-powered, there's no water pressure here, either... hooray... more joy... Well, at least it's supposed to thaw out, today... After I become a little more awake, I realize something... It's not sleety-freezy shitting outside, anymore... "Still sucks, but thank god..."
I shouldn't have thanked anyone, because not only did it not get above freezing all day, but it began snowing right before noon and proceeded to dump about three inches of snow on top of the thousands of tons of ice...
At about noon, I decide it's time to go out and make another survey of that crapola... I walk out to the middle of the street and turn to take a look down the hill... "Holy shit..." At the same guy's house where the tree fell over in his back yard nearly through his house, the super-old, SUPER-huge tree (at least three feet in diameter) in his front yard did not only fall over, it came right out of the ground, partial root-system and all... not broken tree... good-and-uprooted tree... It missed going through the master bedroom of his house by a matter of about two feet... the house next to his (luckily empty at the time), however, is now wearing the tree firmly through the balcony and front porch... It is truly an ugly, ugly mess...
About 6:30pm, I call Mike to get a report on what he's seen out in the field (he's a cable guy)... As I'm talking to him in the sunroom, I'm looking out in the back yard at the some twenty or thirty limbs laying there... All of the sudden, a tree abuot 18 inches across comes STRAIGHT for the sunroom.... and catches on the cable strand (again)... thank the powers that be for strong anchors... I was backing out of the room the whole time, waiting for it to crash through the roof of the sunroom... and it didn't... it just hung there... *SHOOO!* That was tripped out...
[note: as of the writing of this, the tree is still laying on the cables out back... doesn't appear to be going anywhere, anytime soon]
Other than the continuing tree carnage, the lack of thaw, and the snow, the day is rather boring... still pretty unnerving - in fact, I'm starting to become convinced that this will never end - but pretty uneventful... I checked on a couple neighbors (Mrs. Bays' son finally came and got her and took her to his apartment that has had all utilities the entire storm) saw a couple neighbors I haven't spoken to in a while and walked around with them and surveyed more shittiness... heard from my saving grace (Extremelyimportant Person) and went to bed... Tonight, however, the great big, old tree took on a whole new characteristic - where the snow had fallen and clung to the ice glaze, it had formed a face that looked remarkably like the mascot of the band Iron Maiden, "Edward T Head." The face was staring right at me, smiling its wicked smile... Man... I really need the power to come back on...
Sometimes I'd catch these flashes of light through my closed eyelids... I'd open them... "Lightning?" I would think... "Nah... No way... not feeling any thunder or anything..." It happens a couple more times in the next few minutes and I'm totally confused... I shut off my CD player, sit up in bed... and wait... sure enough... �FLASH!�... �KAPOW� (faintly) "A haaa... The transformers..." When they go out, they actually put off an insane amount of light, even from really far away... I put my headphones back on and try to get to sleep...
At a couple points through the night I would hear branches breaking, wake up, look out the window, and SWEAR that the tree was falling... It SO looked like it was coming right for the window... not good for my now thoroughly sketchy heart... I would do just about anything to not be where I was at that point. I'm going mental...

Tuesday, February 18, 2003
Well, the power company said the power, that should have been back on (according to their earlier report) last night will now be on by Thursday... well... okay... so they only missed it by three days. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, though... They weren't expecting quite what they got...
And again... the weather people drop the ball... The supposed-to-be 50� temperatures don't get above freezing... still ice everywhere... still extremely shitty... trees still snapping, but not nearly at the pace they were... mostly because most of the stuff that was going to fall is already laying all over the fucking place...
I'm feeling severely mental at this point... I mean yeah, I've got music... I've got EP doing her best at keeping me calm (she has a wonderful voice among other things, I think). I'm not sure she truly realizes the actual severity of the situation, but nonetheless, she's keeping me sane... I appreciate it way more than I would ever make it apparent to her...

Wednesday is much like the rest... cold... shitty... ice everywhere... there's not a lot to report... Chainsaws a plenty... EP keeps me as relatively calm as she can... Being smelly and cold and worn out takes a real toll on the psyche... It's one thing if you prepare for it, like climbing K2 or something... you're prepared to be smelly and cold and worn out... but when you don't expect it, and don't want it, and it never seems like it's going to come to an end, it kind of freaks you out...

Thursday, February 20, 2003
5:01am
�CLICK�
???
I was totally asleep... but I swear I just heard my converter on my TV come on...
Wait a minute... What did I just think to myself, there? I swear I just heard... my...
I throw the covers off from over my head and lo and behold!
"...let there be light..."
Oh my god! Oh my god! Incredible...
�WHIRRRRR!�
Could it possibly be??? The furnace!!! is ON!!!
Oh, joy of all joys!
The afternoon brings temperatures in the mid 40s and even though it's very sunny out, it sounds like it's raining out... Ice is coming down all over the place... the thaw is on...
...
The house warms up... The water is warm (well, the water is back, first and foremost)...
Soon I am clean and warm... incredible... am I dreaming? *pinch* "Ow! Fuck!" Nope... not dreaming.
No cable (and no net), yet, but I am warm and clean... incredible...

Friday afternoon brings the return of the cable and the internet and I finally can let out a big sigh of some form of relief... That was five days of complete shittines... boy, did it suck... But the suckdom has ceased to be quite so sucky... It's still a total mess... a complete disaster... but I think it's going to be a little better... Things feel almost kind of normal, again... but for five days... it was something else.