Some nasty weather moved through parts of the nation this week. I escaped the worst of it, but there was a freaky weather thing that happened yesterday (Wednesday) morning.
At around 3:15, 3:30 in the morning, the power went out. That woke me up because I have an air cleaner running at night and the sudden silence jolted me awake. That's when I noticed it was raining and there was an incredible wind blowing. It was really intense. So intense that I figured that it wouldn't last too long.
I was wrong. The wind blew even harder and I started worrying about trees coming down. It was still bad at 5:30, scary bad, and there was no way I wanted to drive in this, not even the distance it would take to get on my van pool to work.
I ended up taking a vacation day, although I hate to waste it like this, especially in the middle of the week.
The weird part about the storm? No lightning that I saw and very little thunder. Certainly nothing loud. I have a weather radio, but confess I did nothing to set it up. I always figured thunder would wake me up before the power went out and I'd just flip on the TV and find out what was happening.
I did put on a local news station, but Atlanta is a sprawling city and apparently this storm was only affecting the southern suburbs. The fact that so little was said about the weather made me fairly confident that there wouldn't be a tornado, but I wanted to see radar. I wanted to find out when the intensity would finally drop.
The wind was still screaming when I went back to sleep. I'm not sure when the power was restored, but I was so glad it did
Later, I found out that what happened was called a Wake Low Event. I've never heard of it before and I don't remember ever experiencing one. Winds can reach 50 mph and it can last for hours.
Just to add to the fun, while the power was off, the low battery chirp in the smoke detector in my room repeatedly went off. It's the only battery I haven't replaced recently, but it's way up at the top of a lofted ceiling and I'm waiting for my handyman to come out and replace it for me.
Also, when I finally woke up after the storm was over and the power was back on, I found a scorpion in my kitchen. Some days it doesn't pay to get out of bed. :-/
