cyclone

Cyclone Laila struck yesterday, resulting in quite an adventure for yours truly. We woke up without electricity Wednesday morning (or at least I did. Brad already knew the electricity was out because he witnessed the transformer in front of our house blow up in the middle of the night. Somehow I slept through all that). Anyway, we had no way to make coffee and no good way to get to school. With the driver on his day off, we had to buck up and trudge through the rain for a rickshaw. After a wet ride we made it to school and to the coffee shop, where after a few sips we remembered that during heavy rain our roof leaks, and that our TV sits right under the leak.
Despite the numerous power cuts at school I got through my morning classes. Then I stepped into the hallway and got drenched. Around 11 am the storm was in full-swing, ripping up bulletin boards and soaking textbooks left on top of lockers.
It was lunch time, and in that hour I knew what I had to do. I had to rescue the TV.
The rickshaw driver I finally found outside of school had rigged up some leather flaps to protect us from the rain. But they weren't quite sturdy enough in the wind and I ended up getting pelted by a big, wet, dirty piece of something the whole ride home. I battled with it for a while, then gave up. I looked around and thought about the series of decisions that had led up to that point, and decided I had no one to blame but myself. So I sat there and took the abuse.
When we got to the turnoff to our house, we saw it was completely flooded with water and other muck. But by that point I was like, whatever, and told the driver to go for it. While we were vigorously bobbling our heads at each other, another rickshaw came up and went for it. He was going along just fine until suddenly, whoomp, he was up to the elbows.
With the view of just the other rickshaw's roof in the rear view mirror, we turned around to look for an alternate route home. I had a vague idea of how to get there, but got lost after the second turn. We asked three people how to find our street and got three entirely different answers. Just when the driver seemed on the verge of ditching me in the middle of the road, I noticed something familiar, our neighbor's house! So, in a sing-song, I-knew-where-we-were-going-all-along-voice, I said, "Oh look, we're here!" and hopped out.
The house wasn't completely devastated, but it wasn't completely fine either. The TV was sitting in a small pool of water, the rug was soaked and the computer had tiny drops of water all over the lid. The electricity was still out, so there was no way to test for damage to the electronics. I dried off the TV and hoped for the best. I tried not to think about life without it, a future too terrible to even imagine.
The storm is passed now. Our electricity finally came on around 10 last night. The TV is still lying on the bed, tonight will be the big test. If it works, we can watch the series finale of the Sopranos, something we've been working toward for months.
If not, if not....