About 10:30 Wednesday night, I was ready to pack it in: tired and frazzled from a day spent largely looking for chargers to recharge chargers for phone & Ipad, and then charging the devices while circling in the Fair Wendy’s air-conditioned EV, and buying drippy bags of ice from a darkened but open vape shop for the room temperature fridge/freezer.

I turned off the MSNBC audio feed my phone still had and was starting the push up out of the recliner when — voilá!

Yes -. The lights went on, after 30 mostly sweltering hours following Tuesday’s severe thunderstorm.

The storm & the blow did a lot of damage in and around Durham: trees down all over:

Not far from us, a woman was driving through a very familiar intersection when the storm toppled a huge tree onto her car; she died at the scene.

Lightning struck explosively somewhere near our house, and that knocked out the power. Trucks were crowded into streets nearby today for cutting up trees and clearing roads.

Grandson Calvin, out of school, doing his bit to ease melting congestion in the freezer.

Late Wednesday morning, to add some content, we went to an early showing of Oppenheimer at a theater which still had power. Calvin was absorbed in it — though I wouldn’t blame him if he concluded from it that his great-grandfather’s generation, by its invention & use of nuclear weapons,  must have been more than a little unhinged.
If what he had already learned about the climate conditions that helped produce yesterday’s storm (& last month’s brown days of acrid Canadian and U. S. Northwest  wildfire smoke) reinforced the impression, then who of us could complain?

Meanwhile, In The Yard: the undeterred Morning Glories shrugged off the weather and kept trying to bury Zeke the Owl. They’re close to getting it done.