Storms, Trains, and Automobiles

It was a dark and stormy … day.  Well, it was!

It’s Friday the 30th as I write this.  Not yet noon.  My husband had a bad morning, due to an accident between a freight train and a car, which caused his commuter train to be delayed.  He was late to work, and is not even sure the train home will be on time.  Were there people hurt in the accident?  I have no idea, but I pray not.  If you saw his post you know the car was a mangled mess, unlikely to protect anyone inside from the onslaught of a freight train. 

My computer re-booted at least 6 times in a 15 minute period because of the storm.  They’re saying – at least what I saw before I lost the internet completely, that gusts up to 60 mph are expected.  I get an idea of how windy it is thanks to the flag that flies outside our complex office.  I can tell the wind is coming from the south, and since that part of my apartment is attached to other apartments, I get no wind whistling through my windows, which face east and north.  But I can see that flag pole bend and I know it’s bad – I didn’t need the power going out repeatedly to tell me that.  I guess we’re under some kind of severe weather warning until at least 1 pm, and a tornado watch until 2 pm.  The TV seems to be just fine, but the ‘net is out – as the little blinking red light tells me.  I tried unplugging the router, and then resetting it – nothing.  I can only pray that it’s on the provider’s end and that nothing’s happened to our router itself with all the power disruptions. 

Everything seems strangely quiet somehow.  I can see the wind blowing the trees, but I can’t hear anything.  The fridge isn’t running, nor is the heater.  Neither is my husband’s CPU, which sits up on his desk next to mine.  Usually it hums in my ear, but I turned it off when the power was freaking out so it wouldn’t keep re-booting.  I love the silence, but it’s become such an rare event that it alarms me now. 

The first summer after Darc and I were married, I sometimes slept on the sofa.  He liked to run the window unit A/C in our bedroom while he slept – it kept him cool and he liked the “white noise” it provided.  I, on the other hand, find “white noise” to be torturous.  And he’d set the A/C until it was so cold, I’d lay there shivering, teeth chattering, until I’d finally stumble out to the sofa with blankets to snuggle in the warmth and quiet.  Eventually we figured out a workable compromise, but those early days were cold!  I remember thinking how I’d waited all through winter to be warm again, and yet I was still freezing. 

I guess I was pretty much a quiet kid.  One time, a babysitter forgot that I was in the back of her car until we arrived at her destination and she turned around and saw me.  I still remember how she jumped and said, “Oh!  I forgot you were there!”  Teachers liked me for school plays because I knew to speak up on stage, but that was deliberate, not something that was normal to me.  And I’ve even taken sign language classes so I could speak silently.  I hate being surrounded by constant noise, and it confounds me how I now have 2 children who love nothing more than to scream at the top of their lungs.  I live in fear the management is going to knock on my door and tell me to pack because the neighbors are complaining about my kids.  They baffle me, these 2, especially since Daddy and I are by nature quiet people.  I have to tell them at least 50,000 times a day to be quiet, quit yelling, stop screaming.  The irony is that I have to yell at them, to be heard over their din.  It’s humiliating to scream, “STOP SCREAMING!” like a madwoman.  Next try?  Duct tape.  Sigh. 

Hours later, the internet has come back on.  I was down for over 2 hours so I had some lunch, did some laundry.  It was sunny for a bit, if a tad breezy still, but now more clouds are rolling in and the sky is darkening once again.  More storms, they say.  More winds, they say.  Yay, I say.  I love storms – the ferocity, the power, I love it.  But if it rains between 60 and 90 minutes from now, I’m going to have one unhappy husband, who will have to walk from his job to the train station in it.  I really shouldn’t mention the things he would say.  It was in the 60’s this morning when it stormed, now it’s almost 80°.  Can you say humidity?

It’s Friday.  The weekend is here.  I am glad!  I’ll get to spend time with my husband, and just hang out and not have to do anything else.  What about you?  Any plans?  (Actually that was last weekend.  This weekend we have car repairs.  Sigh.)

 

Bit of an update here.  After my husband put his post up on his DA page, he got awarded a “Daily Deviation” out of it – which is akin to the “hawt post” thing they do here on WP.  His page views soared and he was busy as a bee over the weekend trying to keep up with the comments he got over there.  It was such a rush for him!  He mentioned it here.  Also, there wasn’t much in the news about the accident with the freight train, but I did manage to find out a little something. 

An 80-year-old motorist was hospitalized in serious condition after a freight train struck a car sitting on train tracks Friday morning

At 5 a.m., fire crews were notified that a freight train, “not traveling at a high rate of speed,” struck a car with a man inside.

Witnesses reported the man was eastbound and was going to turn northbound when he instead turned south onto the tracks and was hit by a slow-moving train a short time later. There were no tickets immediately issued.

It was unclear why the man was on the tracks.

It took rescuers 20 minutes to extricate the man from the car. “They had to remove the top of the car and push the dash forward.”

The man — “conscious and breathing” — was in serious condition.

Weather conditions apparently did not allow for Flight for Life to transport him.

The Major Crash Assistance Team is investigating the crash. Driver impairment does not appear to be a factor.