Electricity returns

Woo hoo! My power is back on after being off for almost exactly 24 hours. Not sure if you all heard but a crazy storm came by last night around 10:30pm, with winds of up to 80 mph and now there are like a million people in the DC area without power. It was such a crazy, quick, out-of-nowhere storm that seriously was gone in like 15 minutes but left all this destruction. Most maddening to me was that the people across the street didn't lose power and the people the next block over didn't lose power either. But my block did. And we're in the midst of a horrible heat wave so it's like 100 degrees, temperatures that make air conditioning essential. So after the power went out, I immediately knew it wasn't going to be coming back on soon. There was a tree right next to my building that had lost huge branches so even though those hadn't knocked down the power lines, I knew trees somewhere had surely done some damage. I tried to get some sleep and opened all my windows. There was a bit of a breeze, thankfully, but so many people were out and about inspecting the damage that I heard voices and noises all night. I finally got up and had some breakfast but by like 11am, I could tell the apartment was going to be too hot so I decided to leave and spend the entire day in air conditioning. Of course, I wasn't sure who did have power. I started at the local library and they did have power... and also had hundreds of people there already in every spare inch of space. On my way into the library, though, several of us got stuck in the elevator. That sucked. Luckily, we got out within 5 minutes. Since the library had power, I wondered if my work building had power since they are on the same street. I thought I could sit there, use the internet to discover what else was open and charge my phone at the same time. Success! While there I did some investigating and bought a movie ticket to see Ted at a theater that still had power and was able to sit in a cold theater for two hours. And hit up some retail shops that had power. And got some food at a grocery store that hadn't lost power. By the time I got home that night, it was about 9 and I decided to watch a DVD on my laptop. I hadn't even gotten all the way through the movie when the power came back on. Hooray! Some people apparently won't have power for a whole week, though, so I'm very lucky.