Strange Day/Night

The past 24 hours have been a bit out of the ordinary...not necessarily in what happened, but when.

For starters, last night, I went to bed at around 9:00 pm (which is almost unheard of for me) because I was really tired. Later that night (I don’t remember exactly what time), it started to rain heavily. I got up and turned my computer off and went back to sleep. At around 3:00 am, I woke up again. It was still raining and storming. I walked into the living room to check the weather on the TV. I decided not to turn it on, since I saw the VCR was recording something. The minute I turned off the light in the living room to leave, I heard a big crack of thunder and the power went out.

Now, probably one of the worst things that can happen in our house is the double whammy of the power going out while it’s raining. Our area doesn’t exactly have the same sewer system as other areas do. We have a sump pump to pump everything that goes down the sewer. If the sump pump isn’t working, water comes up through the drain in our basement and floods it. And of course, the pump can’t work if there’s no power.

As I felt my way back to my room, my mom and sister awoke. The first thing on my mom’s mind was all the stuff downstairs. Friday was also her last official day at work, so all of us helped her bring home a bunch of stuff from her job over the course of the day. I went downstairs with her and helped her some important stuff from the floor of the basement. After about 10-15 minutes of doing this, the power came back on.

It was about 3:45 am when it came back on, and the three of us were awake. My mom had started to watch some TV and my sister joined her. We laughed and talked like it wasn’t extremely early in the morning. My mom started acting a little weird after a while, which meant that she had low blood sugar. A quick test using her machine proved it. We gave her some Kool-Aid to raise it back up to normal levels. After a bit, I decided to make myself some potato puffs because I was hungry. Given that I am usually up around that time, I normally make myself something to eat. That made my mom and sister hungry as well, and my mom decided to make pancakes. So, we were all awake at 4:30 am as my mom was making pancakes.

My dad was quite surprised when he got home at a little after 5:00 am to see us all awake and eating pancakes. We also ate some smoked sausage to make it a real early morning breakfast. After that, we stayed up a little bit longer watching TV and then around 6:30 or so is when we started going back to bed.

I woke up later that afternoon to find out that water had gotten into our basement. Despite the power being on and the rain long stopped, about an inch of water got into our basement. Apparently, our sump pump decided to act up and stopped pumping water. While we had moved some stuff earlier, we didn’t move all of it. Hence, quite a few things still ended up getting wet, including clothes and other stuff.

So, just to recap, I was asleep by 9:00 pm, everyone was awake and eating breakfast at 5:00 am, most of us went back to sleep by 6:30 am, and water didn’t get into our basement until after it had stopped raining, after the power came back and after we all went to sleep. Strange day indeed.