Y8 D143

Yes, I am up at 4am on a Sunday and I am not traveling. But B is tomorrow. So I am up to check her in for her flight and make sure she has her boarding passes. Her flight is 8am tomorrow morning EDT. I can't believe it's been 9 days already. So much as gone by.

Yesterday was a bit of an adventure in the afternoon. I went out early to run errands and get things taken care of. Powell's books has a great service where if a book comes into their used inventory that's on your wishlist, they will email you. Whenever a book on my Amazon wishlist goes out of print or becomes unavailable for some reason, I move it to my Powell's list. I got an email earlier this week about such a book. Best part is because it's used, it's priced much cheaper than the original. In this case, it was a cheese book, hardcover, that was $17.95 originally on Amazon. Used, I paid $3.95. Yeah! My plan was to go grocery shopping, then go to Powell's. While I was out at the bookstore, the weather reports started coming in. Tornadoes on the coast. 90mph predicted later in the day. High surf warnings. Inland, 50mph winds predicted. Ugh. I got all my errands done and hurried home to hunker down.

Good thing too. At 1pm the winds starting howling like mad. A couple of brownouts. Nothing major until POP! A tree fell across the street taking a transformer with it knocking out our building, the one next to it, a bunch of houses, and the businesses behind us. Luckily I have this stupid UPS. I still had internet and power. I started gracefully shutting machines down except for one which I used to report the incident (first one to do so), and to monitor the progress. That UPS just paid for itself. First time in almost 2 years I had to use it full load, but it did good. With machines in idle, I had 75 minutes of power available. The power was out for 40 minutes. I had to go to the office and get the manual override key for the garage too. I wasn't going to leave the car inaccessible in case there was a real emergency.

I felt pretty good about being prepared yesterday. I had power to charge my phone, I had internet longer than anyone else, I was ready to pull my car out of the garage. Not too shabby. Power obviously did come back on. I could hear the crew sawing trees outside in the rain and wind. Felt bad for them, but glad they were working.

Didn't do much of anything else. Made a steak for dinner, watched some TV, played some WoW. I am almost up to level 50 on one of my characters. Not too shabby. I started it clean and am doing really well I feel.

Today's plans include going and finding a small heater for this room. We got rid of our big portable heater before we moved but the way the desk is in here I can't turn on the wall heater without fear of melting something. I just want a small little one for under the desk. It was down in the 50s yesterday and it's not getting warmer any time soon. I may also go to the mall today just to get out of the house. Take some wander time. I am going to be doing laundry in the morning, cleaning, and of course in 40 minutes, checking in B for her flight. Let the fun begin.