Back in the light
Early early early Friday morning, two lines of thunderstorms rolled though the Metro. Both of them woke me up, but as I am getting to be a lighter and fussier sleeper these days, that is hardly a surprise. The storms were noisy, and I really wasn't surprised that one of the storms knocked out the power. Don't know which one, and I really didn't care. I just got myself off to work, and I figured Xcel Energy would take care of things, and I would have power back no later than Saturday.
Then the storms blew through Friday evening.
I'm rather glad I skipped the gym, as I would have been arriving home, on foot, right in the teeth of this storm. As it was, I watched it from my (enclosed, east facing) front porch. Like being in a car wash. It toppled one of the trees on my street that survived the tornado, right into a neighbor's front door. Their house took very little damage, though.
And any hope of a Saturday return to power vanished. This storm took out the power to over half a million customers. Infrastructure had to be rebuilt for a much larger geographic area than from the tornado, and a single residential house is not going to be very high on the priority list.
And it turned me into a whiny little brat, with a full display of thwarted entitlement and privileged.
Here's the sum total of the damage to me and mine: about $50 in groceries spoiled, an overturned tomato plant container, water all over the basement floor as the sump pump didn't work, and no lights. The gas still worked, the water still ran, and I had plenty of access to portable power - batteries for my lights and smartphone. I was, at worst, inconvenienced. But, boy golly was I annoyed at how long it look Xcel to get the power back on at my place. Actually, I was more annoyed at how vague they were being on estimated restoration times. According to one of their outage maps, my area isn't scheduled to get power back until midnight tomorrow.
Anyhow, power came back on about seven hours ago. This is the third multi-day outage in three years I've had to deal with, all related to extreme weather. The two in the spring and summer months have been easy enough to deal with, but the winter outage was much more troublesome. I really need to look into getting a generator of some sort, one powerful enough to run the furnace, the house fan, the sump, and all my lights. I can do fairly well for long stretches without the fridge or the A/C or the washer and dryer (can you say laundromat?),but I get really cranky without proper heat and sufficient lighting. Roof, gutters, chimney, tree, generator....
Then the storms blew through Friday evening.
I'm rather glad I skipped the gym, as I would have been arriving home, on foot, right in the teeth of this storm. As it was, I watched it from my (enclosed, east facing) front porch. Like being in a car wash. It toppled one of the trees on my street that survived the tornado, right into a neighbor's front door. Their house took very little damage, though.
And any hope of a Saturday return to power vanished. This storm took out the power to over half a million customers. Infrastructure had to be rebuilt for a much larger geographic area than from the tornado, and a single residential house is not going to be very high on the priority list.
And it turned me into a whiny little brat, with a full display of thwarted entitlement and privileged.
Here's the sum total of the damage to me and mine: about $50 in groceries spoiled, an overturned tomato plant container, water all over the basement floor as the sump pump didn't work, and no lights. The gas still worked, the water still ran, and I had plenty of access to portable power - batteries for my lights and smartphone. I was, at worst, inconvenienced. But, boy golly was I annoyed at how long it look Xcel to get the power back on at my place. Actually, I was more annoyed at how vague they were being on estimated restoration times. According to one of their outage maps, my area isn't scheduled to get power back until midnight tomorrow.
Anyhow, power came back on about seven hours ago. This is the third multi-day outage in three years I've had to deal with, all related to extreme weather. The two in the spring and summer months have been easy enough to deal with, but the winter outage was much more troublesome. I really need to look into getting a generator of some sort, one powerful enough to run the furnace, the house fan, the sump, and all my lights. I can do fairly well for long stretches without the fridge or the A/C or the washer and dryer (can you say laundromat?),but I get really cranky without proper heat and sufficient lighting. Roof, gutters, chimney, tree, generator....