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I love when I can get a good pun in like that. :P
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I had gone down the street to check
on Jesse's dog in the middle of the
storm... got DRENCHED! |
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Studying by candlelight and the light of the laptop...
or at least attempting to! |
Tropical Storm (Hurricane? I don't know.. there was a lot of confusion with that amongst the student body apparently) Rafael crept over the island on Friday, pretty much at the start of volleyball. Yeah, we were playing in the midst of some pretty heavy winds... but, I must admit, it adds a certain level of fun to the game when the wind knocks the ball out of the trajectory you had originally planned for it to travel along. By the end of that evening, the rain began. Nothing out of the normal for a rain storm out here, however. Saturday was full of torrential rain and wind. Then, the SIREN (emergency network through the school) messages started via text messages--"Flash Flood Warning!" "Remain off the roads!" and so on. I swear some people take that as a challenge sometimes. :P My roommates both took that as their indication to flee West Farm--Jackie went to school and Dan trekked his way to Frigate Bay. Well, there's a ghaut in the road about a block and a half from our house that floods with heavy rain. Jackie, although worried with the rushing water, has a SUV, so she blew through it with no issue, minus the fear of being washed away. Dan, who left a few hours later (once we lost power), just walked through it to get to campus and told me later that the water nearly washed him off the edge of the road, partly from the sheer force of the water, and partly from the rocks coming down the ghaut. I elected to stay home with Lia and Reese (and Jackie's cats) despite the power outage. It wasn't so bad--my laptop had 5-6 hours of battery power, and my Kindle had enough so I could read 3 books (two of which were for the Practice Management and Jurisprudence class). I went to bed relatively early, once all my devices lost their battery power.
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This is from a road looking towards the ocean... the two vans
are pushed along a bridge while they got caught in a flash flood.
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Woke up Sunday morning with no power yet. It was nearly 15 hours before it finally came back. (Although I must say that my house cleaned up fairly quickly, cause I was so bored.) I took advantage of the power--washed all the towels that I had used to soak up water coming in through the porch door, took a warm shower (which was also quite difficult due to the low water pressure coming through the water main), etc. Dan and Jackie came home for a bit... or at least until the power went out again. In that interim, Jackie and I took her computer apart--her heatsink had fried the motherboard... things far beyond my capabilities in basic computer repair/maintenance. Once the power went out later that evening, everyone went their own separate ways again--Dan went to Frigate Bay again (until the power came back later that evening) and Jackie went to work an ER shift at the school clinic. As before, I sat at home with the animals and kept myself entertained and busy... and at least attempted to study for a little bit.
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This is from the main portion of downtown, just on the
way to Port Zante.
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Monday was interesting--we got even more of those SIREN messages... including a wake-up phone call around 6:30 telling us that classes were still on. So, we all went to class. Crossing that ghaut was pretty terrifying--there were rocks the size of grapefruits coming down the 2-foot-deep river. There were torrential rains all through class... we lost power multiple times (luckily the school has a generator), and, as an old friend from my Pine Banks days said: "I love the ominous sounds of thunder while the professor is lecturing. It's like a horror movie." It's never a dull moment here. By 12:30, we were sitting in Grand Rounds (7th semester presentations) when everyone's cell phones went off again. Another SIREN message. Campus was being closed at 1:00. *sigh* So, when the last group finished up, well, Kevin said it best: "THIS IS NOT A SAFE PLACE (even though it should be one for students). FLEE, FLEE FOR YOUR LIVES (all at the same time." It was a mad dash to get off campus... and I'll admit, I was really worried I wouldn't get home with how urgent the messages sounded. The ghaut was really no different... if anything, it was better since the rains had been letting up over the course of the day. It was actually so clear on this side of the island that Bonnie, Karim, and I went grocery shopping... despite the half-flooded roads. :P Jen, on the other hand, wasn't so lucky--she lives on a dirt road, which had significant chunks of it washed away. Well, the power was out by the time I got home again, but it came back relatively fast this time... so spent the afternoon studying. Jackie came home not long after I did after I did my food shopping and took a nap for a bit (can't blame her after being on the overnight in the ER), but when she woke up... we pretty much lost power again. We Ross students are pretty good at adapting--we invited Jesse, one of Jackie's classmates who lives a few houses down from us--to come by for tea and some Uno by candlelight, which also then included some Epidemiology quizzing since they have a test today. On a random side-note, it's VERY difficult to tell the blue and green cards apart by candlelight.)
Life is pretty much back to normal now, although the National Hurricane Center is watching the development of another storm brewing out in the Atlantic. On a good note, despite all the cars that got washed away and accidents and mess, I haven't heard of any deaths from the storm... so that's always a good thing. We're all looking forward to the weekend--not only does it already feel like it's Thursday, but it's also midsemester break, so we'll have Monday off! For me, this is a busy weekend if the weather cooperates--dinner for Bonnie's birthday, the
Extra-Life 2012 Gaming Marathon, a paintball game, our usual bi-weekly gaming session, my birthday, and we might be squeezing in a birthday dinner for Heather as well. Phew! Somewhere in all that, I also need to study and would like to run through the ROSSie procedure again.
We had our second set of block exams last week--and boy were they tough compared to the first set. Our Large Animal Medicine I and Small Animal Medicine II test averages dropped slightly, but were still around the 80% mark. Small Animal Surgery, however, dropped by over 10%... and we had an 82% on the first block. That means the class average was under 72%... just barely passing (as our pass grade is 70%). I'm at least in a comfortable spot taking these figures into account! Can't give up though--set #3 is coming up faster than we all would like (can't believe we're at midsemester already!)
Well, hope you enjoyed the update--but I must head back to studying. I'm planning on using a blog post here on Saturday to update my donators on my Extra-Life marathon, so if you don't want gaming updates, you're welcome to check back in a week. :P
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