Day 3456

This is our third day without power. There is still no estimate for power restoration in our neighborhood, but we're starting to see power company trucks, so that's a good sign. I talked to a crew from Alabama this morning who were looking for downed lines behind our house. I've seen repair crews from Mississippi, Alabama, and Oklahoma so far. This is a major effort. Lots of people in the Northern part of town already have power again, but our neighborhood is almost always the last to get electricity. We have the most trees and consequentially the most downed lines. The repair crews need to be really careful with all these downed lines. I heard that they missed one yesterday and started a house fire when they tried to turn the power back on.

One of the guys from Alabama told me that they may get our power restored later tonight. I hope so. We've almost run out of clean towels and I may need to go to the laundromat tomorrow. My little generator definitely won't run the washing machine. Actually, I've been very pleased with the little generator. Technically it's called an inverter and delivers much cleaner electricity than a traditional generator. When I bought it I just wanted something to run the computers. I'm discovering that it will power quite a few other things as well. The small refrigerator runs fine using the generator. Janet was able to use her hair dryer as well. I was even able to fire up the Keurig machine this morning and make myself some coffee. The generator will run all day on two gallons of gas. That's pretty good if you ask me.

I discovered that my solar powered generator doesn't do so well on cloudy days. There wasn't enough sunlight today to use the solar panels to recharge the batteries. Gasoline came to the rescue though. I used my gas powered generator to recharge the solar generator. A lot of people drive Teslas in Dallas. I wonder how those people feel now. They are dead in the water for the time being. Their car batteries have run down and most of the charging stations in Dallas are dead. I haven't seen a single Tesla on the road for the past three days.

The best thing that happened today was that my tree guy came over and removed all the dangerous dangling limbs from the elm tree that got damaged. I was one of the lucky ones who got tree service in two days. A lot of people are still waiting. We discovered that a more of our tree had fallen in our neighbor's yard than we initially thought. Luckily neither of us had much damage to our houses. I did lose the greenhouse though. The tree crew will have to come back later to remove what's left of the elm tree. They are only doing emergency service right now and had two more jobs today after they finished with my tree. For now, everyone in the city is just dragging their downed tree limbs to the curb. I have no idea how long it's going to take the city to clean this mess up. There are huge piles of ruined trees everywhere. It's a shame to see so many mature trees destroyed in the neighborhood. These old growth trees were one of the things that made this part of town special.

Apparently yard work is better exercise than going to the gym. I haven't taken a long walk since the storm roared through town, and I'm still burning more calories and taking more steps than I was before. When you spend most of the day hauling logs and big tree limbs out to the street, you end up doing a lot of walking. By the end of the day, I'm tired. I thought this would help me sleep, but so far it isn't working. It feels stuffy in the house without the air conditioner running. It's also too quiet. I'm used to the sound of the dehumidifier running constantly and usually we keep the fan running on the HVAC system so there is some air circulating in the house.

I'm still sitting in the dark, but I saw a large power company truck one street over from ours just before sunset. That's a good sign. Hopefully, when you hear from me tomorrow, we'll have electricity again.

Willa is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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Day 1723

Today didn't go well. I took my phone to the Apple store to get the battery replaced. The person I talked to at the Genius Bar was nice enough and told me that they'd have my phone fixed in a hour. That seemed fair enough, so I used the hour to drive up to my watchmaker and pick up my watch. Neither of us could remember how to set the old Tissot T-Touch, so I took the watch and told the watchmaker that I'd look up the instructions on Google. Unfortunately, I left some of the packaging for the watch up at the watchmaker's studio, so I'll have to make a second trip up there to retrieve it, assuming that it hasn't been thrown away already.

When I returned to the Apple store, they powered up my phone and showed me that it still worked. I was good to go. Unfortunately, I should have tried the Home Button on the bottom of the phone before I left the store. When I got home, I discovered that this all important button doesn't work anymore. Without the Home Button, the phone is fairly worthless. I looked up "non-functional iPhone Home Button" on Google and discovered that this button is frequently rendered inoperable when technicians try to pry out the battery. Located near the battery are several very small chips and jumpers that control the operation of the home button and power switch. If these components are broken or sheared off while changing the battery, you will need an entirely new logic board. Now I've got to go back to the Apple store and convince them to give me a new phone. Given the miniscule size of the components that are probably broken, it is doubtful that something like this can be fixed. I should have just kept the old battery. The phone was working fine, but lure of a free new battery was just too strong.

Dot's incontinence seems worse on odd numbered days. There is no rhyme or reason to this, but she seems to alternate between good and bad days. This makes no sense to me. Dot eats and drinks the same things every day. She should be getting progressively better in some sort of measurable way, but so far, the progress she's making seems pretty random. At some point we're going to have to decide whether to put Dot on medication. She doesn't even realize she is peeing in her sleep, but we certainly do.

I dread going back to the Apple store tomorrow. I had to wait a long time today, and it will probably be the same tomorrow. Why didn't they notice this problem before they handed the phone back to me? It's always something, isn't it. On my way out of the shopping mall I stopped at the new Tesla store that just opened. You can't buy a car there, but you can look at one. It was the first time I'd actually seen a Tesla in person. What a cool car. There's one small problem though. The thing runs on 8000 small Lithium Ion batteries. Just imagine when those things start going bad. A Tesla with faulty batteries will make my iPhone problems seem like nothing.

Domino is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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