We just recovered from a super crazy storm! We got over 10 inches of rain including 7" in just one day. The rain, rain, rain came down, down, down in rushing rising rivulets! and the wind huffed and puffed but did not blow our house down. The wind did blow down a big tree in our neighbors yard, mercifully it only crushed their cyclone fence and blocked the driveway a bit. They cleared it out so we could pass and then cleared it properly 2 days later. I did go down to help them clear it, but I fired up my chainsaw and realized my chain was blunt, so went back to the house to put a new chain on, finally found it and installed it and by the time I got back it was raining and they were almost done (whee!).
We lost power early on in the storm and didn't get it back for around 60 hours. It worked out pretty good now we have our generator but since it's so small we can't use the generator for our electric stove or our electric hot water. Boiling water on the wood stove is kinda easy and we took a trip into wifey's office to take a shower which worked out well. Baby was running around the office completely starkers, good job it was the weekend! We had the status number on speed dial and called often, it's maddening to have the time to restoration keep being pushed back and last we heard they said they'd have more info Wednesday, so I didn't even flip the switch to have the power come back on during the night, then I call at 2AM on Monday morning to see if thy have a new estimate and the robot asks me what kind of outage I have. Oh joy! I run out to flip the big switch and sure enough, we have power! It's such a great feeling to have made it through another outage and we're getting so good at it now it's starting to feel less like a big deal. One of our faraway neighbors still had their generator running well into the next day, I wonder if they too really had power, but just didn't know it yet?
I found myself pondering the problem that the electric company has to solve when scheduling the crews to fix the outages, I imagine it's a pretty interesting problem and wonder how automated it is? You need to get the most people online as quickly as possible but need to factor in access to the places to fix, how easy they are to fix and also merge in incoming outage information too, fascinating!
In other news, the initial pool work was done and turned out cheaper than expected and looks awesome, I'm very, very happy with it! I pulled out all the old conduit and it looks much tidier now. I'm going to wait until winter is over before replacing the filter. I might even do that myself now the hard work is done. I don't think we'll even end up getting a pool sweep installed, but it's always an option.
