DAZE WORK: When the weather gets too personal

This time it’s personal. The weather, I mean.

Dodging raindrops and hailstones seemed bad enough Wednesday night, but that was before I spent part of the evening in the inner sanctum of Buffalo Wild Wings and the rest of the night in my La-Z-boy with no power, no cable TV and no motivation.

So you see why it’s personal this time. Not that I care whether it was straight-line winds or funnel clouds or funnel cakes that stalked me. But you know it’s going to be a strange night when your waitress warns you, “If the storm gets any worse, we’re going to take you all back in the rear hallway.”

So, of course, you know where this is going -- to the bowels of BW3’s. The storm got stormier. Hail was crashing down on the roof like it was raining rocks. And yes, the servers came for us.

Suddenly we were herded to the rear of the restaurant, past the bar, out the door, into the hall and around the corner, passing boxes of mop heads and Mr. T mixer in the process. All the while I kept thinking about that classic episode of “Twilight Zone” where the book the aliens were guided by turned out to be a cookbook -- titled “How to Serve Man.”

Smartly, one of our group was wise enough to bring along her blood mary from the table on our forced march. The rest of us were left to wonder how thirsty we might be by the time rescuers dig us out of the rubble.

Cue nervous laughter. Booms of thunder. Hail the size of canned hams, as David Letterman once famously reported as a Channel 13 weatherman.

Sure I could interject the old standby “trees were blown down that had never been blown down before” here for a cheap laugh. But I wouldn’t do that.

But in a matter of minutes it was over. The storm passed. Appetizers were ordered. Drinks were consumed and all was seemingly right with the world.

Even the restaurant staff was jovial again by now. Holding the door open for us as we left, the waitress whimsically offered, “Hope you enjoyed the complimentary tornado.”

Funny. But not so much when I got home.

Greeted by the sound of silence (not the Simon and Garfunkel kind), I quickly realized the power was out. The cable TV was off and the dog was curled up in the corner like he’d seen a neighborhood cat the size of Shrek on the patio.

There’s an app for this I thought and quickly contacted Duke Energy to report my outage, figuring I’d be back and better than ever in moments, maybe even get to watch the second episode of the new “Fargo” series.

But instead I sat in the dark, pondering the situation, life in general and my sad lot in it. Minutes turned into hours and sometime after 1 a.m. I decided to give up and prepare to be awakened by a blaring TV whenever the power returned in the wee small hours of the morning.

But I slept until 7:25. Nothing woke me up. “Mike and Mike” weren’t on my TV like they’re supposed to be (perhaps ESPN axed them too?). The dog wasn’t begging to go outside. Nothing seemed right.

Apparently a tree or limb came crashing down on some Duke equipment and put me and 15 neighbors out of power until nearly 2 p.m. Thursday. Not a big deal. Not even a real test of will or a dire 20-below-zero survival situation.

Personal, that’s what this storm was.

To take my mind off it, I checked with sources around the county for damage reports. Most had none to offer.

But trees were apparently down all around Fillmore although Fillmore Elementary School reportedly escaped unscathed.

In fact, just to show how fickle Mother Nature can be -- 70 mph winds and all -- school secretary Penny Long, shared a story.

“We’ve got baby birds out here in a nest,” she said of a spot just outside the school office window. “And they’re all still here.”

And you know what, so are the rest of us.