Tasnim Shamma

There are still about 12,000 power outages in Mecklenburg and neighboring counties. About 350,000 Duke and Progress energy customers lost power after a severe thunderstorm Friday night.

Keith Meza, is a Duke Energy crew member who has been working almost non-stop since then. He was in north Charlotte Friday helping remove tree limbs that had fallen and damaged power lines.

"Other than ice storms and hurricanes we've had, it's probably one of the worst ones I've ever seen due to high winds and lightning and hail," Meza says. 

Welcome to A Trifling Place, a podcast dedicated to exploring the ins-and-outs of Charlotte.

When I first moved here, there was one billboard that I found really confusing. It was for the new '49ers football team at UNC Charlotte. 

The only 49ers I know of are 3,000 miles away … in San Francisco.

Furniture giant IKEA has just installed 4,228 solar panels on the roof of its store in Charlotte. The panels are expected to generate up to half of the store's electricity. 

ESPN executives toured the Charlotte Motor Speedway on Tuesday to see if it would make a good site to host the summer X Games. The X Games is a four-day event of extreme sports such as BMX freestyle, skateboarding and motorbike competitions. Charlotte is one of four cities ESPN is considering to host the games for three years, starting next summer. 

Perhaps you've had a pen pal as a kid. Chances are it was someone who lives far away. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools SchoolMates program has a pen pal program among its own schools. In one case, students from schools less than two miles apart wrote letters to each other throughout the school year. Wednesday, they got to meet each other for the first time.