Last night, the block my apartment is on lost power. It was during a pretty harsh thunderstorm, so I didn’t think much of it until I realized that our power lines are underground. My neighborhood in Oak Ridge has above ground lines with lots of trees, so I am used to the power going out during storms. The storm last night was also one of the harshest I have seen in Chicago; the Ryerson weather station reported a high wind of 56mph around midnight and around 2 inches of rainfall in an hour. Anyway, the power was incredibly screwed up for the rest of the night. We unplugged everything after I saw the TV sort of flicker on (it was off before) when lightening struck really close by. Hopefully are surge protectors didn’t get the full 1.21 gigawatts of power. For a while, we got an extremely low amount of power; enough for some lights to barely glow. It was strange. At some point, a firetruck came by, which one of my roommates and I watched from the porch while clearing the drain, so we could watch a whirlpool form (entertainment options for a bunch of computer geeks is severly limited sometimes without power); A cop watched us and pulled off as soon as we went inside, which was pretty funny. As far as I know, the power is still out; hopefully we will get it back soon. We heard some strange, almost explosion-like sounds throughout the night, so hopefully the damage is not that bad.

The other side of the street wasn’t affected, but all of the streetlights and even the university police boxes were all off and all of the buildings next to ours were off, which made for about the darkest I have ever seen Chicago. I am used to being able to see around, even if all of the lights are off. There is so much background light, that it is easy to forget it is even there. It made for an interesting evening.