The power is back!

I’d sketched out a series of posts, to write about what happened after brunch at Belga Café, but last week’s storms threw a wrench into those plans. I left the hot humid city last Friday night for Matt’s house, in order to meet his sister-in-law T and my mother the next day for some shopping adventures, so I wasn’t in the district when the 70+ mph winds whipped through. It knocked out power in a lot of areas, and my neighborhood didn’t get power back until sometime on Tuesday night. I came home Wednesday afternoon to a musty apartment and a stinky refrigerator.

While we were still out shopping in Delaware on Saturday afternoon, T got the unfortunate news from her husband (Matt’s brother) D that they also lost power at their house in Baltimore. Matt’s community was one of few residential neighborhoods in the Columbia area that didn’t lose power! Matt and D packed up a few things from Baltimore, and were waiting at Matt’s when T and I returned. We had a packed house last weekend! Four 30-something adults, and one adorable Bichon Frise.

I kept an eye on my neighborhood through our community listserv and through Twitter. There was a lot of good information, scattered with a bunch of complaints and one or two conspiracy theories. I’ve not lived in DC long enough to understand certain things, like this terrible horrible hatred of Pepco, and I am lucky enough to not deal with them myself (utilities are included in my rent).

D & T stopped home on Sunday morning to check on the house, and to bring down some of their defrosting food. One box in their freezer contained the top tier of their wedding cake, which they’d planned to thaw and eat on their first anniversary. Oh man, this was the best wedding cake ever, a moist and delicious chocolate mint with buttercream and chocolate ganache. There was an upside to all the power outages: eating leftover cake!

Luckily I had my work laptop with me, and I was able to work remotely from Matt’s house on Monday and Tuesday, instead of trying to deal with the commute into DC again. News reports told of downed trees, downed power lines, detoured Metro buses, and packed Metro trains. The power came back on in D & T’s house early Monday afternoon, but mine didn’t come back until sometime on Tuesday night.

Matt brought me back into the city late Wednesday afternoon, and I took the time to clean my fridge before hitting the grocery store to replace some essential items, like milk, butter, and yogurt. I’ve got an amazing A/C window unit, and it didn’t take long for the place to cool down. With this weekend’s temperatures expected to top 100° F, I really hope we don’t have an outage like this again anytime soon.