My son had just hit a double in the third inning of his baseball game when the thunder started getting close and the game was called. My husband and I took separate cars, and our younger son and I left first. We were almost home when the wind really picked up and the rain started. The power blinked on and off a few times and by the time my husband and older son got home it was pouring and the power was just out. That was about two hours ago and now we’re sitting around by candle light. Our utility company’s website says the power should be restored by about 11:00 PM, but I don’t know how much blogging I’ll get done. Mr. LC bought a generator not too long ago but we haven’t used it before and it’s not hooked up to anything yet. I also don’t know where I put the little device I can use to charge the laptop in the car. Oh well, at least I knew where the candles and flashlights were stored. This is nothing compared to what happened down in Oklahoma, so I’m not going to complain. We’ll be just fine. We have water, the toilets work and there is a roof over our heads. It’s just a little dark and if the lights don’t come on soon we’ll be taking cold showers. Things could be much worse. Anyway, here are the things I was reading before the game and the lights went out. 1975 : Tornado Outbreaks Blamed On Global Cooling 500K In Stimulus Money Wasted In Richmond Cultural Survival Instinct Sharyl Attkisson’s computers compromised (Gee, I wonder who did that while she was reporting on Fast and Furious) The White House claim of ‘doctored e-mails… to smear the president’ (Three Pinocchios on that one.) This last one is pretty timely considering the power outages. Here’s an excerpt, but read the whole thing if you can. How North Korea Could Cripple the U.S.: A single nuke exploded above America could cause a national blackout for months.

North Korea needs only one ICBM capable of delivering a single nuclear warhead in order to pose an existential threat to the U.S. The Congressional Electromagnetic Pulse Commission, the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission and several other U.S. government studies have established that detonating a nuclear weapon high above any part of the U.S. mainland would generate a catastrophic electromagnetic pulse. An EMP attack would collapse the electric grid and other infrastructure that depends on it—communications, transportation, banking and finance, food and water—necessary to sustain modern civilization and the lives of 300 million Americans. EMP effects can be made more powerful and more catastrophic by using an Enhanced Radiation Warhead. This is a low-yield nuclear weapon designed not to create a devastating explosion, but to emit large amounts of radiation, including the gamma rays that generate the EMP effect that fries electronics. The EMP Commission warns that, “Certain types of relatively low-yield nuclear weapons can be employed to generate potentially catastrophic EMP effects over wide geographic areas, and designs for variants of such weapons may have been illicitly trafficked for a quarter-century.” An EMP attack could plunge our electricity-powered civilization into a blackout lasting months or years. One problem is that the Obama administration canceled the only two U.S. boost-phase interception programs, declining even to fund further study of boost-phase or space-based defensive systems. All U.S. Ballistic Missile Early Warning radars and interceptors are currently positioned and located to intercept a missile strike in the middle or the late part of its trajectory, coming from the north polar region.

Okay, that’s it for now. I’m going to go look for my car-charger thing in case the lights don’t come back on soon. Have a great night and count your blessings.

Update 11:18 PM ET: The lights just came back on. I have to say, I was really glad. It was so quiet and dark, even with the candles and flashlights. I don’t get all of the lefties who want to send us back to the dark ages. I happen to like things like lights, hot water and refrigeration. I miss them when I don’t have them. When I get them back I appreciate them more than ever. We should celebrate these luxuries we have rather that try to do away with them. I do notice that most of the lefties who are against our power sources are regular consumers of those power sources. So I guess they’re just dumb. So we’re all good now. But I do have to update our disaster plans. It was getting dark when the storms hit. I watched the local news and they said the worst storms were going to be to our north, so I didn’t think we needed to be prepared for anything tonight. There were things we couldn’t find, Mr LC wasn’t able to get the generator started. I need to gather everything in one place where it’s easy to find and get to in the event of a real emergency. You should, too. You never know when disaster will strike.

Update: May 22, 12:06 PM ET: Just after I posted this update I lost my internet. The headline never updated and it all looked weird, at least from this end. Sorry about that. Oh, and what is it with kids who you tell over and over again during a power outage not to open the door of the fridge turning around and opening the door of the fridge? I had to put a chair in front of it as a reminder so we didn’t lose all of our food.