Saturday, after I logged off from my work laptop I tried to take a nap for a few minutes as the weather was good for being lazy.
It is cold, the air conditioner was off the whole night and the wind started to blow in our house. It was not strong the night before, it is enough to keep your fans off the whole period.
After getting a power nap for around 30 minutes I asked April if she was going to do the laundry. She said yes, however since rain starts to pour, she's not sure on where we will let our clothes hang to dry.
An indoor clothesline isn't an option for us, since we have two cats running and jumping everywhere that causing chaos in our home. Thus we decided to postpone it in the meantime, and wait for the weather to be better.
I heated the leftover food from the night's work and we proceeded on eating our breakfast. A few minutes after, the lights are flickering and after some seconds everything was turned off. Power was out and heavy rain with strong winds began to howl.
We finished our breakfast and told April to check and see if there are news available where we can tune in. I forgot to load my prepaid phone with data plans as I solely rely on the internet service that we had. Globe, Smart, and Dito, the 3 leading mobile network providers are unavailable. It seems that their towers are affected too.
I received a text message from MERALCO saying that there's a power interruption and they are not sure when it will be fixed. I am anticipating that the power interruption will be at least more than 12 hours as we are already in the eye of the storm.
Watchful for what will happen next I checked the outside of our home. Trees are still intact, and no flooding as of the moment. On the other side in my parent's house, I am expecting a huge flood already and my siblings already moved their items to the 2nd floor of our house. Later I confirmed that happened, Biñan is still flooded and there are multiple people who are waiting for relief operations from the government.
In the afternoon, April and I talked about where should we put our equipment as I saw that the water coming from the mountain started to fall down I am noticing that the backyard's full of rainwater already, and around two to three inches it will enter our premises. She mentioned that she doesn't know as well and I just nodded let's see what will happen next.
We decided to sleep early that night. With no electricity and wifi, there's nothing to do. Good thing we still have some small candles in our house that I bought previously as if there are none we will have a hard time on walking as the house was dark already.
When the rain stopped pouring the day after, and power was returned I tried to check our surroundings a lot of fallen trees and a small flood remains.
I told April that I would also go to the market to buy some supplies since our home was quite dirty due to the rain. The water supply was cut off and when it got restored, sand started to pour for more than an hour.
What did I learn from this experience?
I am used to such weather conditions back then but I become complacent.
I was not prepared as the supplies that we had in our home is just enough to keep us okay that day. The idea, that I had left our home and I will not experience such bad weather is a scam, and being a father now I should have known better and been prepared for whatever happened. I always forget about buying some tools such as hammers, nails, screws extra lighting, etc. which now I realized is an important asset as well.
So always be prepared and make sure that you have available stuff around.
▶️ 3Speak