The tornado

About a month ago, Ottawa was hit by a tornado. (Well, 3 tornados.) Here is my story.

I was still at work on Friday when I got the tornado warning alert. I wasn’t worried, but I did walk down the street instead of down the bike path that is more open and goes under the big hydro towers. (For people outside of Ontario, hydro = power, not water.)

I got home and Wanda decided to make pancakes. She was cooking when the power went out. She put the batter in the fridge and we waited for it to come back in. About 10 minutes later, the wind really picked up, and I said “we are going downstairs NOW!”

We hung out downstairs until it had been calm for a while, and then came back upstairs and decided to bbq the pancakes. (I have a camp stove, but at this point we thought the power would be back any minute, so we didn’t even think of pulling it out.)

Wanda went out to the bbq and started cooking, and I went outside to talk to her.

Now, to back up a minute, I usually keep the garbage can right outside the back door. The bbq is just past it, and as I was talking to Wanda, I noticed that the garbage can had been knocked over, so I went to put it back up.

That’s when I saw the skunk.

The skunk also saw me, and he started to spray - luckily in the garbage can.

That’s when the rain started, so we raced into the house, leaving the skunk outside.

We finished the pancakes in the fireplace.

Saturday morning, the power was still out and the skunk was still in the garbage can. I had been under the impression that it was a small power outages but ... that was not the case. The power was out from Kanata to close to downtown. That’s about a 40 minute drive when the traffic lights were working.

We got rid of the skunk (he did not enjoy us putting the lid on the garbage can and wheeling him towards the bushes) and set up the camp stove. My cousin came over with a generator so we could charge our devices, and we played games by lantern light and then went over to a friend’s for s’mores and hot dogs.

On Sunday, we made it to a grocery store, which looked like a zombie apocalypse had been through. When we got home, we cleaned out the freezer and put everything into coolers.

And then we went for a walk. Many of the pictures below are about 3 blocks from my house.

We were without power from Friday around 6 pm to Monday at 4:45 am. I spent Monday cooking the meat that had thawed.

I lost some shingles from the porch roof (and spent Thanksgiving weekend replacing it) and one branch on my tree was ripped in half. I got off pretty lightly.