I'm one in a million

Good luck finding a cool place to hide. I heard from my cousins who live in the area that some estimates place return of power in several days (four or five!). Unfortunately, they don't have a theater for me to offer you.

That stinks. I'm heading out this evening or it would have been a good opportunity to finally meet! I could have picked your brain while you shamelessly tried to lower your core temps. Maybe its time to button up the "black cat" ??

Btw - almost everyone in Ashburn seems to be up and running. Guessing it's the new(er) underground infrastructure.

Sorry to hear about all the trouble BIG. I saw all of the devastation on the news. That really sucks.

I've got a few open seats for a showing of "Super 8" here in Upstate NY. If you're in the mood for a drive then feel free to stop by.

Hmmmm.... I've got a pool deck that I need to get working on so maybe you could help me get a head start on that too.

Sorry to hear that Jeff. We arrived home from a 2 week vacation in OK and Colorado at 9:00pm this evening to find small branches all over the yard. We have power and cable and it doesn't seem that there was much damage here though. We did see trees and branches down from middle Ohio to VA. In fact, most of the rest areas in Ohio and WV had electrical crews in them staging for the repair work. I have not ever seen so many electrical lift bucket trucks as I have over the last 18 hours or so. They are all over the highways!

Man, sounds like a long sucky weekend

We drove Friday night sat morning from howell mich thru Ohio thru west Va thru Va straight to nags head NC. The storm got us in Ohio around 5pm, I was looking for cloud rotation. Saw 6-7 semis flipped over due to winds. Hundreds of trees in the roads. here is image as storm approached

We had 20 minute standstill as trees being removed.

Sounds like a bad deal for sure. Hope you recover sooner than anticipated

I'm in Baltimore; we got hit pretty badly. We got our power back yesterday afternoon and our Comcast just came back up. It's definitely been a crazy weekend.

Our power went out Friday Night... man that storm front was amazing. Not a leaf moving and you could hear the front coming. Sounded like a growing ocean wave. Then when the first wall of clouds showed up you could see how fast they were moving and the sound kept growing and growing. still no air movement... and then WOOSH all at once. Trees were sideways. I know, people in the midwest get storms like that constantly. Same as BIG, we had well, and water was out as well. Cell phones were out until saturday afternoon. (On verizon) Sunday afternoon though the power was restored. We just drove around mostly, going to movies, restaurants, shopping, etc. Anywhere that had power. Slept in the basement, which remained around 72 or so the whole time even with the 100 degree heat. All of our houses have buried lines but the power that feeds those lines are on poles and right along big trees.... sucks. Time to look for one of those whole-house generators.

Then I'm TWO in a million.

Our power went out Friday night about 10:20. Right in the middle of watching Super 8 (Hey, Austin, did you like it?). We heard the wind and thought it was raining but it was the wind through the trees. LOGANESS and I both put down the foot rest of the chairs and got up. My son left the foot rest of his chair up and got up. I paused the movie, and power flickered and went out. I grabbed the flashlight and started watching the sump pit. Fortunately, there was little rain. OR the ground was so hard that it all ran off because the level of water in the pit never really grew. The storm blew over in about an hour, although the lightning show was spectacular and lasted much longer. Went to bed after we were confident the rain had passed.

Saturday was BRUTAL. Temps in the low 100s and no breeze. There was no ice to be found; at least that's what we heard from the neighbors. Grabbed some steaks, chicken and pork chops from the deep freeze and grilled 'em up before they went bad. Inside temp hit 89 at one point. The Theater, on the other hand, was nice and cool. But, you know, it's a THEATER, so it was, um, DARK. All day. Sitting in the dark is boring. In the evening we were sitting down there and my son is stretched out in HIS chair. LOGANESS and I could only last so long sitting upright so we went upstairs and TRIED to sleep.

Remarkably, it cooled off by early morning. I got up Sunday morning and it was only 70. My son slept in the theater. He and I headed out on a reconnaissance mission, mostly to find coffee. Turns out about four miles down the road (toward Ashburn) power was on. We pulled into a Harris Teeter and they had a trailer full of ice. They GAVE me four bags. Found coffee and breakfast at an open McDs. We put a bag in the fridge, the freezer and the deep freeze, pulled out a cooler and put a bag in there with some of the things we thought might go bad first. Most of Sunday was not too bad on the deck as there was a small breeze MOST of the day. By about 3:00 it was back up in the high 90s and even the breeze gave up. Back down to sit in the dark theater for a while.

So as the sun went down we were back on the deck. Just as it was getting dark, I say to LOGANESS, "I can't tell if the orange glow in that window is a candle or the lights are on." Just then my son walks onto the deck and says, "You see those lights, too? There's another in the window next to it, too " Then through the trees I could see little points of light. And every once in awhile we heard a cheer go up. The problem is that I know that section is on different feeder and at best it could be a couple more hours.

Then right at 10:00 the lights come back on! The FIRST thing my son says is, "Do you want to go down and watch the rest of the movie while the house cools down?" A real chip off the 'ol block! We were 20 minutes short of 48 hours. We quick emptied the perishables from the fridge and freezer. Checked the deep freeze and everything in there was still solid, so we left that. Then we went down and watched the rest of the movie.

Man, that doesn't sound like any fun. Glad you didn't lose too much food or anything

It wasn't any fun, and some people are STILL out. And it's back up to 100 today. On the way home from work on Friday (before the storm), the outside thermometer in my car read 106 most of the way. the killer was humidity. It was FEELING like 110.

Glad to hear you guys are slowly coming back on line. Reminds me of the year we moved to Houston and Hurricane Ike rolled through. We didn't have power for 8 or 9 days.

I can't imagine being out that long. We were getting ready to start looking for a hotel after 2 days! And we had to find one that would take the dog. My neighbor said he thinks he got one of the last rooms anywhere near that would take a dog.

I heard Motel 6 was charging $500 bucks a night and gas stations were gouging customers in the metro area. We were out for about 28 hours. Used pond water to flush the toilets and the upstairs was 92 degrees in the p.m. of course we are also on well water. Imagine how NOLA felt during their diaster that lasted forever.

We just got our power back last night (July 4) almost exactly 5 days after the power went out. And like Jeff (BIG), we have a well, so no water either.

Found a neighbor with a backup generator who agreed to look after our dog, which permitted us to check into a local hotel for 5 nights to avoid the heat.

Because of all the trees around here combined with above-ground power lines, we seem to experience multi-day outages at least once per summer and once per major winter snowstorm.

I foresee a backup emergency generator in our future...

I thought that it was pretty good. There were some awesome audio moments (the train crash scene is stunning), but I thought the ending didn't live up to the hype that was generated throughout the rest of the movie. You watch the whole thing wondering what this mysterious creature is and then at the end it just flies away. I'd still recommend it though as it certainly isn't horrible.

I'm glad that you guys are back up and running now. It sounds like you had a horrendous few days.

I feel for you!

We're all underground and on city water and RARELY go out at all. I think our previous longest outage was 6 hours. I have to be thinking that if this was happening to me once every year, I'd be on a whole house generator...the kind that run on natural gas. I'd heard about the gouging, too, but didn't actually experience it.

HeyNow^ - if you'd shut down the still up there it wouldn't have been so hot.

The wife said I need to increase the still's output, so we can get a whole house generator....

Its crazy that I live no more than 5 miles or so from Big and our power didn't even flicker. Meanwhile my parents (which live in central WV) are still without and aren't expected to get it before the weekend. I keep trying to get them to come here but they are old and stubborn .. hey that's where I get it

I'm glad SOMETHING good came out of it! We got to clean out the fridge and freezer....there were things buried in there that should have been tossed ages ago.

Yeah, I similarly spent a couple of hours yesterday completely dismantling and cleaning all of the shelves and drawers in the fridge and freezer. After 5 days without power in this heat, the food in there had gotten very RIPE!!

Separately, the power outage (maybe the surge of power when it came back on?) seems to have killed our kitchen dishwasher. Good thing we installed another dishwasher in the bar outside the home theater, but it's a pain to haul all the dirty and then clean dishes up and down the stairs to the basement. With everyone in the area recovering from power outage-related damage, a repair person won't be able to get here until mid next week.

Got power back yesterday. Was able to nab a generator at HD the morning after we lost power. FIOS worked, but my neighbors Comcast wasn't. Score 1 new customer for FIOS.