Where were you when the lights went out?!

Last night we had a BIG storm. The kind where the sky turns completely black, streaks of lightning illuminate the clouds, the wind kicks up and the rain comes down hard. With this one, some funnel clouds were reported but no tornadoes actually touched ground, at least not near us. Before the storm, Mike and I had been sitting by the pool looking toward the southwest, which was pretty light and clear. I could see a grey cloud lurking around to the right, but didn't think much of it. The sky had been a bit gray before, but we decided that we wouldn't be lucky enough for it to actually rain. I thought I saw some flashes of light, but figured it was just the way I was blinking. Mike stepped into the pool house for a minute and came out and said with urgency - "get the dogs inside - quickly!" I looked around to the north and the entire sky was pitch black and moving toward us fast. I herded the sixteen paws into the kitchen and started to get things out to make dinner. "Make dinner" is a generous term, it was more like "reheat leftovers" and cut a few tomatoes for a salad. I am glad I got our plates warmed up when I did because we lost power within seconds of the last microwave beep, and it didn't come on again for many hours.


This is how we handled the outage

We could see lights on in other neighborhoods and Kerry Lynn reported that we had electricity at my house, just 4 miles away. Mike checked the Austin Energy website and there was a big area of outage including his neighborhood with an estimated fix time of 11:56 Friday night! Fortunately it came back on sometime in the night and everything was fine this morning.

The dogs were clearly upset by the storm. See how agitated they were...