Holy f-ing hurricane, Batman!

We had 80mph straight line winds yesterday. Our house is undamaged, and our trees are more or less intact. But we had 300,000 people without power in the Miami Valley last night, and it's now been reduced to 200,000. Business are being told it could be 3 days before the lights come back on. Kev and I were told to stay home by our employers, as neither has any power.

We were without power for 11 hours yesterday, but we were the lucky ones. Our power kicked on at 2:30am, and Amanda, who is just down the street, is still without power. Go go City of Kettering! The DP&L trucks were circling our neighborhood for hours last night, trying to find the transformers that blew. We heard three small explosion in about 3 hours yesterday, so we knew why were without power. And exacerbating that is the fact that DP&L sent a large chunk of their service vehicles and manpower to Texas to help residents there regain power after Ike. They never dreamed we'd get blasted by Gustav all the way up here.

The devastation here is unbelievable. We were really lucky, though. We've got one 10-foot-long, six-inch-wide branch that broke off the top of one tree and landed in another. It's not precariously balanced over a power line (possibly cable) that leads into our house, not to mention that if it comes crashing down, it could do some serious damage to our house. I put in a service request, but they said it will be the end of the week before they even start attending to them.

The amount of trees that were just blown over and uprooted is amazing. I took some pictures around the neighborhood, but my cell service sucks, so I'll try to upload them later this week. Every single street you look down has trees across it. I've never seen anything like it. It's like tornado-lite.

I spent a total of maybe two hours over the course of the day getting my yard cleaned up. Kettering will begin debris removal this week, and I had to get everything hauled and raked to the curb. I've barely touched the backyard, but I'm going to try to get my hands on a leaf-blower to take care of that. I've got all the big branches cleaned up and cut down to manageable sizes, and I cleaned the gutter that was buried in leaves.

Mike and Leah stopped by last yesterday; Leah and I were supposed to go to the movies. But the stoplights were out all the way there, and everything up by the Dayton mall lost power. So we hit the highway to come home. People are either too stupid and too selfish to obey the traffic laws when stoplights are out. They're supposed to be treated as a 4-way stop, people. DUH. You don't blow through major intersections at 40-mph without even looking, as one enormous moving truck did at the 741 - Dixie Drive intersection. He almost obliterated a pick-up truck who was taking his turn. Leah and I were freaking out.

Because my cell was dead and the power was out to prevent me from charging it, I didn't get the message from my boss that work was cancelled. I should have guessed, but I drove all the way there only to find a "Closed" sign on the front door, and a 60-foot-tall tree laying across our parking lot. If this storm had happened today, about 15 of my coworkers would have flattened cars.

Awesome.