Sitting in the dark

[bjarvis]

A rather horrendous line of storms swept through the greater DC area around 6 PM EST or so. It was brief, but the winds were remarkable and the downpour was more than the storm drains could handle in our neighbourhood. After much flickering through the duration of the tempest, the power here finally failed as the storm continued moving east.


In a brief walk around our neighbourhood, there's extensive tree damage; I pulled several large downed limbs out of the street. One neighbour's car has been hit by the leafy end of a large limb but I couldn't tell immediately if there were any scratches or damage to the car itself. We have a number of large branches in our back yard from trees across the street but no damage to our property. Mercifully, the frightful heat & humidity (heat index approaching 110) of the past week has finally broken.

It's times like this that I realize how infrequently I plug in most of my laptops. Both Toshibas have dead batteries, but at least the HP I use for square dance calling has a full charge thanks to last night's open house in Baltimore. The UPS is keeping the DSL modem & wireless router functioning but the Linux box and iMac are down to preserve the UPS' battery.

There's so much I wanted to get done tonight but it looks like I'll have to start working on my stack of back issues of Harper's, reading by candle-light.

Of course, I could put the car in the garage and connect the power inverter to the cigarette lighter...

Nah, I'll read.

Comments

[tdjohnsn.livejournal.com]

I don't think the power has ever gone out here in the past 10 years. Maybe once or twice, but it has always been the "went out at 1:00 am after we are long asleep, come back on before 5:00" variety of power outage.

and I have trouble believing you can't find something better to do by candle light than read...

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Our local power utility has determined that the best way to shore up their accounting in recent years is to defer maintenance and refuse to clear vegetation & trees from power lines. (Another one of their tactics is to not replace failed street lighting.) If there's a strong wind anywhere, the power flickers and there may be outages of a few seconds. Battery back-ups have shield my primary computers against those minor interruptions but it's still a pain in the ass to reset the timers on the microwave, the VCR, the stove, etc.. This is the first significant outage in a few years and I can't really blame PEPCO for the outages caused by Hurricane Isabelle.

I can think of other things to do in the dark, but (a) it's still too hot & humid to move, and (b) Kent was at a reheasal downtown.

[billeyler.livejournal.com]

Very impressed you can post onto LJ without any power! :-)

I mentioned a week or so ago that our power went off on campus, so our part of the university took part or all of the day off.

Recently, the power went off at the house about 2 minutes after I left for work and was off for three hours. Resetting VCRs and bedside clocks was the worst of it.

Those are the first real power outages I remember in a very very long time here...

Hope the storms there didn't do too much widespread damage...the radar map of that 2000 mile-across cold front was very impressive...that's the same one that passed through here!

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Very impressed you can post onto LJ without any power! :-)

I'm a geek: it's what I do. :-)

That whole "cold front" thing is a severe misnomer, IMHO. This is a "cooler front," in that the temperature on the west side is only in the 80s instead of upper 90s. After being promised a cold front for so long, I feel cheated. So long as water is liquid, it ain't cold.