Call Me Wimpy

OK, call me wimpy.  For one of the few times I can remember in our almost 40 years of married life, I got into our tornado hidey-hole with my wife last Sunday.  Normally I’m NOT out looking at the clouds; I’m looking at the radar and the TV.  But the house went dark when the lights went off, and on KFDI on the battery radio, they said the tornado was spotted just south of Mid Continent Airport.

We live just a half mile or so west of the airport, and I was thinking deep inside myself that the storm was moving away from us, but stranger things have happened than to have something change and now a whirlwind is right on top of us.  So I got a chair and sat in the little closet under the basement stairway while the wife sat on some pillows over in the corner.  We had our medications (important for old folks), a light, battery radio, blankets and pillows, and a few other things we thought were important like an extra cell phone battery fully charged.

We didn’t spend a long time in there because a short while later they said the storm was farther away from us.  We came out and surveyed things which by now consisted of rain and small hail and some wind.  I called the power company’s “out of service” line and was told by the mechanical man that it would be 18 to 32 hours before we were restored.

I started planning hooking up the emergency generator to run the refrigerator and freezer, along with a few lights.  I had a gallon or so of gas in the unit, so knew it would be good for an hour or so.  I got it hooked up and going; then went to the Quick Trip place where they had power and pumped five more gallons of gas into a can…came back and poured it into the machine.

So, we were set for awhile.  Although nothing happened to us from the wind or hail, I felt rather uneasy and disconnected, so to speak, from normal life.  Besides, the generator was now sputtering from time to time and wasn’t running well.  Neighbors came out and we visited about the events of the day.  One neighbor had his generator going as well.  We commiserated as best we could.

After about six hours, the power came back on.  The mechanical man was incorrect, thankfully, and the power was restored just about dark.  I disconnected the generator, hooked back into the power grid, blew out the gas lamps, and went back to normal.  Later in the week, I took the generator apart and found a grounding wire that was sometimes touching the metal shield close to it, causing the spark to be intermittent.  Fixing that fixed the generator.  I put a load on it and ran her for awhile…did fine.

So, call me wimpy.  Hidey hole…generator…gas lamps…radio.  Age tends to make a body look at things just a little differently than it did some years ago.  And that’s not a bad thing.