Day 3455

We still don't have power. Basically, we're camping now. The power company now says that we might not get electricity restored until late Thursday. It's a mess all over town. Traffic lights aren't working. There are still trees in the road. In our part of town businesses that don't have generator power are closed.

As I expected, the tree trimmer never made it over here today. He promised to come tomorrow. We'll see. There are still people ahead of me in line. I don't have a chain saw, but I was able to remove some of the downed tree using a reciprocal saw powered by a generator. Janet helps me haul the limbs out to the tree and by the end of the day we had a huge pile. Most of the neighbors had huge piles of their own.

We filled three large coolers with ice and were able to salvage most of the food in the refrigerator. The ice cream and a few perishable items went bad, but all in all we did pretty well. I discovered that I can run the small refrigerator off one of the generators, but the gas tank isn't very large and I don't think the generator will run continuously overnight. I ned to go buy some more gas tomorrow morning.

The solar powered generator can be completely recharged using solar panels in less than five hours. This works out pretty well since we only use this generator at night so we can run the network and get on the Internet. Some little LED camping lights provide all the lighting we need. I do miss the air conditioner though. It was pretty hot today. Neither of us slept well last night because it was too hot inside. I don't think we're going to start in a hotel though unless it gets really bad. I could buy a pretty capable generator for the price of three nights in a decent hotel. At least we've still got hot water. I definitely needed a shower after spending most of the day hauling logs out to the street.

The Falcon Heavy launch got postponed a week. This is just as well. I'd like to get all the power outage problems resolved before we start planning a trip. This is the first multi-day power outage we've had for a long time. I remember the bad one well though. Living without electricity takes a lot on ingenuity. I wish I had a really large generator that could run off natural gas. Some whole house generators do this. They're pretty expensive though. That's the thing with power outages. If you go buy a big expensive generator, it's almost guaranteed that you won't have another outage for five years. I haven't even gotten much use out of my little gas generator.

I hope I sleep better tonight. It probably helps that I'm really tired this evening. Sawing and hauling heavy logs is a lot more strenuous than walks in the park. I missy morning smoothie. One more reason to go out and get five gallons of gas for the generator tomorrow morning. Janet needs the generator for her hair dryer too. I'm not sure the generator can handle the hair dryer, but we'll see.

Escher is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day