Well, it's been a strange couple of days. Yesterday around 11:00 in the morning the city of Ames completely lost power. There was a big storm that moved through with straight line winds over 80 mph, and it knocked down tons of trees and power lines. This actually affected much of central Iowa. I was at work when this all happened, and after a couple of hours of standing around in the dark our clinic was finally closed. After I got home I could see that limbs from our neighbor's willow trees were blown everywhere in our yard and theirs. There were a couple of other neighbors down the street that had entire large trees fall down. So Elizabeth and I spent a couple of hours helping them pick up branches and move them onto piles. We spent the rest of the evening at home with candles lighting up the house.
Today our power did not come back on until 3:35 in the afternoon, so we went over a day without power. McFarland clinic was still closed due to the power outage, so I did not go to work today... very strange to have a Tuesday off. I had put a couple of large bags of ice in our deep freezer, and luckily that all stayed frozen enough. We did have to throw away a few things from our refrigerator (milk, cheese, yogurt, mayo, sour cream), but it wasn't too bad.
I might as well update the coronavirus numbers, for comparison to my earlier blog posts this year. So far in the United States there have been 5.15 million confirmed cases and 164 thousand deaths. In Iowa, there has been 49,339 cases and 940 deaths. This has been a pretty shitty year.
On a happier note, I am looking forward to taking the boys up to Cass Lake this coming weekend. We are leaving this Saturday and will come home on Wednesday.
