MoThEr NaTuRe RaMpAgE

She may seem nice and sunny, but Mother Nature has a growing angry streak. The Washington D.C. area has been battling over 100F temperatures for a few weeks now, which combined with high humidity makes it quite miserable. More miserable than southern Florida, apparently. 

Last Friday evening a group of us were headed to the movies for a 10:40 showing. We loaded in my car and drove to the theater and miraculously found a parking spot. When we walked in, the lines were chaotic. When we finally made it up to the counter, our lady wasn't even paying attention. She was watching some angry man get upset on the other side of the counter. "Hmm... can we buy our tickets please?" ... If only we had known why he was upset.

As soon as we got in line to head into the theater the lights started flickering and even more people began freaking out. Apparently a lot of the movies had turned off because of a power surge from an impending storm (we had heard distant rumblings on the way over.) We decided that instead of sitting in a theater we'd just get our money back and try another day. So there we sat with 20 dozen of our closest friends, waiting to get a refund. However, I get impatient and after 5 minutes of waiting we went back to the original counter and just got vouchers instead of waiting the hour plus in line for a refund. I mean, who isn't going to come back to the movies?!

As we turned to walk out, there was a wall of people. A little confused, I fished my way through to the doors just to meet a torrential downpour outside. The kind that if you actually did walk out, in .05 seconds you'd be absolutely drenched. We decided to wait out what we thought would be a few minutes storm inside the theater. Unable to find even floor space to sit down, I noticed that the 3d of Prometheus was playing so we went inside to sit. Bad, bad, bad idea. I am NOT good with those types of movies so every few minutes we'd go check if it was still raining. After about 20-30 minutes the rain had subsided enough (and I was ancy enough) that we made a run for it.

On the way home I was dumbfounded. In the 30-45 minutes since we'd left my house--to no rain--lights were out, traffic lights were out and trees were down all over the place. In fact, in one section a tree had fallen across one side of the road, the large median and was 1/2 way into my side of the road. Driving down the street was somewhat eerie because there were no lights as far as the eye could see. I said to my friend, "If our power is out, I'm staying at your place!" By some miracle our power was on (ironically, he was out of power for two days.) At first we were going to watch a movie (still not grasping how large the storm was) but with lightening around, we decided to just call it an early night.

The next morning:
Power: on and AC pumping.
Internet: not working.
Cell phones: not working.
Text messages: Not sending.

I was supposed to meet up with people but had no way to get in touch with them. I decided to go to the gym to see if I could get cell service there. Nope, even worse (and more and more trees down.) Luckily they decided to just come to my house... but they had to because THEIR power was out. Imagine, 100+ degrees with no AC--yuck. And soon we found out at total of 1.2 million people in the surrounding area were without power. My house quickly became a lodging for people needing a cool place to stay, even a place to work when offices were closed.

On Saturday to stay out of the heat we went to:
Whole Foods for lunch: full of people, few groceries.
Walked through Old Town: If a store was actually open, they were "accepting cash only."
Movie Theater: Sold out. We bought tickets to a later show.
Barnes and Noble: Good place to pass time; that's what everyone else thought too. We found a lovely little corner in the kids play section.

When I was at Barnes and Noble looking through recipe books, I overhead two little girls talking. The first said, "are you here because you're power is out too?" The second girl said yes, to which the first responded, "us too. They say it will be out for at least a week." I felt so awful. I really would rather have power out in the winter, you just build a fire, pile on the blankets and at least your food wont spoil? Some of my coworkers literally had to throw out everything in their refrigerators. yikes.