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August 04, 2015 - 11:25 p.m.
"i've never seen anything like this" or "summer storm"

Hey Journal!

Wow! What a CRAZY night last night. I have never seen anything like it before.

I was sleeping and, at about 4:30am, all of a sudden I woke up when I saw crazy lightning. I don't think lightning usually wakes me up but this was different... the sky was lighting up for a really long time and flickering really fast. I heard a little thunder and then about 2 minutes later I heard rain hitting the windows hard. Dan woke up and we looked out the window. It was coming down like crazy.

I tried to take some video of it but you couldn't really see much and it didn't do it justice. The rain was pelting the house and we think there may have even been hail! Leaves started sticking to the window and then all of the streetlights went out and we lost power! The rain started coming down so hard that I couldn't see anything out the window. That sounds like an exaggeration but it wasn't!

The storm moved through pretty quickly and was gone in about 15 minutes! We went back to bed with the power out and Dan woke up at about 7:00 for his morning walk. I had just finally gotten back into a deep sleep and was having a weird dream when my phone rang. Dan told me to come outside so I went out in the back. Although the whole neighborhood's power was out, we had a little bit of a bigger problem. One of our trees back in the corner of the yard had split and is laying across our power line. Great. It also took out the cable line, too.

Since I figured it would be a while before we got our power restored, I got ready for work and I put all of our frozen food into one of those cooler bags you can use to take food home from the grocery store. I put it in the car and then headed to work.

Dan called PSEG and reported our problem and let them know what we had a downed power line in the yard AND that the pole was cracked (that's the old pole that's looked a little precarious for a while now!)

When I got to work I checked the LIPA Outage map. There were a lot of triangles in our area and throughout the day they slowly went away. We had a hard hat symbol directly over our house which means that a crew has been assigned and is working on the problem. Originally it said that the ETA was 4:30pm but at about 12:30 it changed to 11:30pm.

On my ride to work I was shocked at how unaffected areas nearby were. Even two streets over there were barely any branches down and on Indian Head Road it looked like nothing had happened! It was really weird. From the news reports it looks like it picked up intensity RIGHT over our house and then got worse and worse as it went East to Port Jeff. Stony Brook and Setauket were the worst hit!

Work today was good, I made a lot of progress on the dues. I finished all of the Business member invoices and then I worked on transferring money for people who are inactive this year but had already paid.

I left work at five and headed home and when I arrived no work had been done yet on our power. When Dan got home he went in the backyard and started skimming the pool. I went back there and as I was coming back around the front… I saw the PSEG truck pull up.

It was two guys who came around the backyard check out the situation and said they couldn't do anything until the "tree crew" arrived. The tree crew arrived shortly after and they came with chainsaws, rope, ladders, and all sorts of crazy stuff! They got right to work and at one point we had eight guys back there working to get rid of that tree! It was great because they cut the tree into MUCH smaller pieces and by doing that, Dan was able to bring a lot of pieces out to the curb… And the rest we can probably break up ourselves. That saves a lot of money not having to get tree people to take it down! Once the tree crew is finished, the original two guys got out their ladders and hook the wires back up. They were even nice enough to restring our cable wire which also falling down. Dan brought out ice tea for them since it was really hot out! We would've given them snacks we had absolutely no food to offer.

Once those guys were done, another crew came. The original guys told us that they thought the wires were live up to our house… And that we had taken out the rest of the neighborhood once those guys were done, another crew came. The original guys told us that they thought the wires were live up to our pole… and that we had taken out the rest of the neighborhood!

Even after all the crews were gone, the power still didn't come back though. Dan spent some time outside and I saw him talking to our favorite neighbors!

Around 7:30, we took out the chainsaw and Dan started cutting up the pieces of the tree into small enough sections that we could drag them to the curb. Dan did the cutting and I went back and forth with the big branches and made a giant pile in the street! We made great progress. At about 8:30, I was down by the street when the street lights came on! The power was back! I went inside and turned on the air conditioner so that the house could start cooling off.

It was pretty dark by now so Dan and I stopped and decided to take a walk. The other side of the street was only on for ten minutes and then it went out again. Luckily we still have our power!

We did a short walk around the neighborhood to see who had power, who didn't, and check out all the piles of debris in the streets!

When we got home, Dan and I rolled two of the three big logs down to the street. One was easier than the other because it was pretty round. The other had offshoots coming off it which stopped it. Anyway, we got them to the curb and they're waiting to be picked up by the town, now!

I took a shower and Dan picked up the miscellaneous branches and sticks in the back. We only have one more log to go. It was way too heavy and we couldn't move it. Tomorrow Dan is going to use the chainsaw to cut it into smaller pieces.

After we were all showered up and ready for bed, we watched Monday's Teen Wolf. We had the episode recorded.... the TV and internet still isn't back yet.

Anyway, now it's late and it's time for bed! Until tomorrow...

Goodnight. :)