In which the weather went just plumb crazy.

A massive storm rolled in this morning. We had 60-mile-an-hour-PLUS wind gusts, and the atmosphere was filled with tons of suspended dust.

All the stuff on the porch ended up in a pile. Gramma went out and released our retired Christmas tree from its stand, and the whole damned tree blew away – we haven’t seen it since.

Tree limbs hit the roof and fell to the ground, littering the yard with broken branches.

Two of the three guy-wires holding my uncle’s old ham radio antenna have snapped. Half the shingles came off our neighbor’s rear roof elevation and are piled up in our yard (but I didn’t notice any missing shakes from our roof when I went out to look) and very few people still know where their garbage cans are. The entire city lost power for over five hours.

My employer’s data center (‘the vault’) was down for 45 minutes, because the generator battery failed. I didn’t have to come to work until 3 o’clock, because with no power the call center couldn’t operate. And now that I am here, I’m calling hundreds of customers who’d left voice mails to explain why our auth and email servers didn’t work earlier today.

Here are more pictures of the carnage, taken by a co-worker’s friend.

There are houses with trees through them, cars with trees on them, downed power lines, and general chaos everywhere. (In other words, if you’re an insurance adjuster, you should load your fuckin’ ladder and get the the hell out here. There’s mega mad damage, yo.)

In other news, there’s capuccino cream pie in the break room!

Update: It’s 9:17 and I just spoke to Gramma. She tells me the power’s still off at home, which means no reading in bed for me. Ugh.