We had a major storm go through the neighborhood yesterday. High winds, torrential downpour. We had standing water outside our patio door - which is rough to get when the backyard slopes-off almost 5 feet. In fact, my lawn turned into a swamp.

Then around 8 o'clock the power went out.

I couldn't take the suspense after about half an hour, so I took Carol's SUV that's parked in the driveway and tooled around the neighborhood. There is debris everywhere - leaves, plants, branches, entire branches broken-off trees, siding missing on a house a block away. This was so much worse than I thought. I drove around to get an idea of how large of area was involved. I head on the radio that an American Airlines hanger at O'Hare lost most of a wall in the wind.

I got home and there was still no power. Around 10:30, we noticed that the people across the street behind us had power. But history told us that our little corner of the world has had bad power problems.

Now, we're still in the middle of the heatwave. It's still in the 90's outside. the air conditioning had been off for a while and you could feel the air stagnate and get warmer. We can't open the doors or windows, because even though it had finally stopped raining (though the lightning still continued for hours) we didn't want to warm-up the house. We attempted to go to bed.

What a lousy night of sleep - or lack of - that was. Woke up this morning. Still no power. Carol got up and showered by flashlight. I went and sat on the couch and let our "kidlettes" (Indy & Chip) out to romp around. Carol went to work. I called ComEd a few times, first to open trouble tickets (because they had NO RECORD of an outage in my area!). AT around 10:30, I called ComEd again, and this time I got a status saying that I should have my power back at 1:15pm today. At around 11am I got an automated call from them saying that I should have power by now, Uh, WRONG! So I had to call to re-open the outage ticket.

I was having a new DirecTV dish installed today so that I can get HD signals for that big screen TV in my family room that has been a ton of fun to watch... too bad it was just sitting there, powerless, and totally un-enjoyable. The installers called earlier saying their morning call had canceled, and wanted to come over now. No, not without power.

Around 1pm I noticed ComEd trucks in the neighborhood, wit guys running around looking at the pedestals in the backyards (our power in underground in our development, like most - if not all - of the more modern developments that have been built in the last 20 years - which just pisses me off even more, because when this happens due to high winds, you know it has nothing to do with the immediate neighborhood - it has to be some place where the feeder lines are above ground - so they can blow down and cause havoc). the installers called - still no power, so we'll have to reschduled... DAMN!!!

Then, around 1:35, the power comes back up! I call the installation company and get them to come over! I liked the guys - a father and son subcontractor team that pointed out everything that was bad with my old setup and explanations why I haven't had good reception that I had expected. We also had discussions on my poor choice of antenna for the new system (fortunately, I had purchased two - don't ask) and had them on my garage roof, deinstalling the old dish and installing the new one in a more solid location).

Now other than a fight with some wasps that were living in a downspout, things are finally progressing. The air conditioning is starting to cool the house back to acceptable levels,the refrigerator is cooling and chilling our food again - nicely insulated from the heat and we're not going to loose anything.

I hate these outages - you feel so helpless and today, I just felt trapped - waiting for power, waiting for installers.