Day 414

We woke up this morning to rolling power outages and a temperature of only thirteen degrees. This wasn't a good combination. Our house isn't well insulated and you could feel the temperature drop minute-by-minute. It would have been nice if TXU had warned people that they were going to be shutting the power off periodically throughout the day. I've already had several computers ruined by the surges associated with power outages. Luckily, the first outage occurred before the computers turned themselves on for the day, so I was able to unplug everything that might be damaged. It got pretty cold for a while this morning, but everything seemed to stabilize around noon. At least in the Winter, you don't have to worry about food going bad in the fridge when the power goes out. All's well that ends well though. We're warm as toast now. The furnace repairman even stopped by today to check out my intermittent furnace problems and give the old furnace a clean bill of health.

I took advantage of the lack of electricity this morning to switch out the computers in the office. I am now officially using the new computer for everything. It must have been weeks ago when I told you guys that I got the new computer, but this is the very first blog post I've published using it. One reason I waited so long was Dreamweaver. I use Dreamweaver every day and I knew that once I started using the new version, I'd have to spend a lot of time downloading a whole new batch of Dreamweaver Extensions and getting used to the "improvements" in the application. Sure enough, when I got to work after the power returned, I discovered that some of my favorite Dreamweaver MX extensions don't even work on CS-5. I found what I needed on Adobe Exchange though and I'm off and rolling again.

I haven't seen the park so empty in a long time. When I took the dogs on their evening walk I noticed that my boot prints in the snow from yesterday were still the only footprints around. Absolutely no joggers today. In fact, I didn't see anybody at all. We must have been the only ones foolish enough to go outside. I think Dot ate a little mouse while we were walking today. There was a rustling in the tall grass and she pounced on something and started chewing. Whatever it was, it was gone before I could open her mouth and look inside. It must have been a mouse. All the horse poop in the park is frozen now.

So much for that old "Neither snow nor rain nor dark of night" adage about the postal service. Nobody has delivered our mail for three days now. I've seen postmen delivering mail in other parts of town, but they can't seem to make it to our house. This is probably just like our garbage pickup and this morning's rolling power outages. Somebody probably decided that everybody needed to come down to the post office and pick up their own mail during the bad weather, but forgot to tell the people who were actually receiving the mail. Oh well, tomorrow's another day. I guess I'll go down to the post office and find out for myself what's going on.

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