Today is the sixteenth anniversary of the Waste Watcher going into production. A rather large life milestone for me.
Spent the morning writing and posting. Pretty normal. But it was a short morning as we had errands to run.
We finally made it out to do shopping today. We drove out to Reghin late in the morning and managed to get to Kaufland which was actually open today. This was glorious as we managed to actually get groceries and stock up on things that we need. We were so happy that this finally worked today.
When we got to the grocery store the girls spotted a playground near the grocery store so after we were done shopping we headed over there to let them play for a while. When we got there it was warm and sunny. We were at the playground for probably about half an hour. Towards the end the sun went away suddenly and the temperature dropped a lot and a few drops of rain fell, but Dominica and I were sitting under a tree so really only felt a drop or two in total.
We were going to leave the Luciana spotted another playground in the same park and the girls had to test it out so we went over for them to explore that as well. We got a few minutes there when I felt the air change and said that we needed to go. Luciana stalled a few seconds instead of coming immediately and it caused just enough of a delay that we went from slightly chilly to running for cover of a large tree and the sky opened up and it began to pour and, a few seconds later, to hail.
We were close to our car, close enough that the seconds that Luciana had stalled would have allowed us to have gotten to it. Now we were stuck in the cold, windy, wet and hail under a big tree with a few other people who had gotten trapped. We did not even have jackets as it had been a warm summer-like day when we had gone to the playground!
Eventually we were getting so cold and wet from the storm that we decided that we just had to make a dash for the car leave our cover of the tree. This made for us all getting totally trenched and our shoes getting wet as the parking lot was under water. But we got to the car and got the heater running and soon headed home.
On the way home, as we neared the village, we noticed that it had not rained there, only in Reghin. Once home, it still felt like the almost summer day that it had been all morning leading up to the storm.
Today ended being an adventure in lost power and Internet access. Our first real storm since we have been in Romania at the house rolled in early this afternoon. We were not surprised so much when it descended on us quickly as this had already happened today in Reghin. We all stood out on the back porch watching the sky turn to a super dark grey while the house remained bathed in sunlight.
While we were outside watching the storm approaching, the power went out. At least this time, seeing the force of the storm, we were confident that it was not just us who had lost power.
We were without power until pretty late. We packed up the car and were ready to go in case we did not get power back tonight. I had seen Iocab, the priest, outside in the rain and had asked him about the power and he said that the village was without power and that this just happens in storms. He told us that it should be back in two hours.
We gave it two hours and were sitting in the cold, dark house when the two hour mark rolled around. It was nine twenty at night and thankfully we had already packed the car as we would not have been able to see had we tried to pack now.
The power came back on, literally as we were pulling out of the driveway, but as the lights in the house had been turned off we did not figure this out until we were halfway through town. We turned around, went home, checked the house and went back inside.
Unlike the power, though, the Internet stayed off for the evening only coming back on very late, around midnight. The power stayed on most of the evening but went off again later on, but not for so long that we tried to leave again.
Eventually we went to bed with power and Internet restored and were hoping that they would last through the night.