What started as an ordinary day…
pamelamyers | June 25, 2010
…quickly deteriorated into chaos. Yesterday was a normal Thursday morning, I took Sam to my mom’s and I headed off to work. Nothing in the forecast but the threat of gusty thunderstorms, but it is summer in Pennsylvania, so what else is new? My mom had called me early that morning to tell me the news that Sam was feeding herself Cheerios! We were all so excited about this. She has just started eating very limited amounts of table food, but we always have to put the food in her mouth, she will never do it herself. So this was a big step for her. We are proud of you, Sam. 🙂
At around 3:00, Mark sent me a message that it was incredibly dark and thunder was booming and it looked like we were going to get hit really hard with a storm. About 20 minutes later, he called me from his cell phone to tell me the power was out and we were in the midst of a big storm. I left work at 3:45 as usual just wanting to get home without getting too wet, and hoping the power would be back on soon since it was so hot, about 90 degrees, and we really needed the air conditioning. Well, no such luck. At 4:00 SEPTA announced that not only was the R3 not running, but the R1, R2, and R5 train lines were also dead in the water. The train station was chaotic as everyone tried to get home. I took the Market Frankford El to 69th Street Terminal and then jumped on a bus headed to Springfield Mall where Mark was going to pick me up. At any rate, after what seemed like hours…no, wait, it WAS hours, I got back home at a little after 6:00. Still, no power. We did the best we could with the heat, but it was horrible, and Samantha was a basket case. As I have mentioned before, she really cannot take the heat, and it was absolutely oppressive in our house. Mark ran to his parents’ house and picked up their old generator that they are not using any more, and quickly had the AC going in our bedroom and the freezer downstairs plugged in. He was smart enough to run out and buy a bunch of bags of ice and we packed them into our refrigerator to try to keep the rest of the food cold. Sam, despite being miserable, finally went to sleep at 9:00 in her Pack and Play in our bedroom. We wound up going to bed at 10:00 ourselves. Still no power. We all had sort of a restless night because it’s hard to sleep when things are so unsettled, but we all did ok. It’s funny, last night was the very first night Sam ever slept in our room. Even when she was a baby she always has slept in her own room. Let’s hope she doesn’t think this is a permanent arrangement!
I called PECO at 3:00 a.m. and the message was finally changed from basically, “we have no idea when it will be fixed because we can’t find the problem” to “we are trying to restore your power by 11:00 a.m.” When we woke up this morning, still no power, but we had hope! Well, 11:00 came and went and no power. So we went out to get something to eat at a local diner that thankfully had power and was up and running. (Incidentally, what was even more infuriating was that our next door neighbors on one side and the houses after that one, as well as the houses on the street behind us, had power almost the entire time. Grrrr!!!!!) We got home from the diner at around noon, and YAY!!! at 12:20 our power came back on! I am always running around the house turning off lights that have been left on but I was never so happy to see lights on in the house as I was at that moment. It was funny, I was sitting on the floor with Sam throwing her up in the air and she was giggling. Have you ever seen Monster’s Inc.? In that movie, the monsters need to scare children because their screams are what powers the monster world. By the end of the movie, they figure out that laughter is even more powerful. It was like Monster’s Inc….Sam was laughing and the lights went on.
Anyway, after 21 hours without power, the Myers family, Mark, Pam, Sam and Zephyr, survived the storm of June 24, 2010 unscathed. A little battle weary, but pretty much ok. Mark set up the generator to keep us cool, thought to buy ice to keep our food from spoiling, and had a calm and clear head the entire night. He was our hero. 🙂