Well, as far as we’re concerned, the Great Power Outage of ‘03 ™ is over. Yesterday, at work, the power flickered and went off. After 10 minutes or so, we decided this was a bit more major than previous blackouts. Information started filtering in (those of us with laptops were still on the internet, as our router and networking infrastructre was UPSed), and we learned that power was out all over the northeast, in a swath from New York to SE Michigan and NE Ohio, right through Canada. At that point, we decided power wasn’t coming back that day, and we left for the bar. Why not home, you ask? Well, everyone and their brother decided to try and go home, and the result was total gridlock, what with no stop lights. (On a side note, the city sent out trucks with generators to power the stop lights in key intersections. This made a huge difference to traffic flow, and extreme kudos go out to the city for thinking of this and carrying it out, rather than redirecting the generators to “other uses”.) So, we sat in the (dark) bar, and drank cold draft beer (cash only), and chatted. It was actually quite relaxing. Oddly enough, cell phones worked fine (for many hours at least), and the internet was fine (if you had battery left in your laptop), but you had to have an ancient land line phone for it to work without power.
At any rate, after the traffic cleared out, I went home, and broke out the million candle-power flashlight and tons of candles. The evening was somewhat boring, although we read some and did a crossword, and watched about 1/3 of Holy Grail (before my laptop died). We ended up going to bed early, sleeping on the floor downstairs to avoid the heat up in the bedroom.
This morning, I went out to see if I could find a place with coffee. I didn’t fine coffee, but it turns out Meijer had a generator, and was selling food. Nothing from the freezers, which were covered with plastic to keep the food from spoiling. But, the credit card machines worked, so I got food. Then, we learned that Janette’s parents had power, so we headed over there. On the way, we discovered that Main Street had power too, so I did manage to get my coffee this morning. (yay!) Spent the day at Janette’s parents, and power came back up here about 4:30 or so. I came home and booted up all the computers and plugged the Tivo back in.
Total loss for the whole event appears to be one graphics card, and some (old) food from the fridge. On the whole, not a huge price to pay for a free day off.
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