Sunday, January 06, 2008

Blogging by battery back up, again

Well, not quite. Our home has been one of the lucky ones in Yolo County for the past few days. With power out all over the area, our power stayed on throughout the worst of the wind and rain. That was until about 4:15 this morning when the alarm on the UPS that I use for my computer and DSL started beeping. I know almost every beep in my house. It wasn't the chirp of a low battery on a smoke detector or my carbon monoxide detector going off, so I woke up and saw that the power was off and the beep was coming from my UPS.

Neat.

I looked through my window at a sea of darkness, no lights in Esparto or any lights in my area. My buddy called me the night before telling me how his power has been off for two days running. I thought it might take a while for the power to come back on with all the outages and every crew PG&E has working around the clock. I checked the local news websites with the 10 minutes of backup power I had and there didn't seem to be any news about our area so I figured it must have been a blown transformer or a line down. Strange, there was little or no wind and rain last night, so my money is on one of the casino patrons crashing into a power pole trying to navigate the narrow country roads.

I stoked the fire back to life and threw on a few more logs. I already have the bathtub full of water to flush the toilet with so I was as ready. I found my little portable radio and tried to get some news on. No luck. Sunday mornings at 4:45 are very sparse when it comes to live news or any news, just a lot of folks selling vitamins or get rich quick schemes. Arrrg.

Oh well, I didn't want to wake my wife up so I sat on the couch next to the fire with my earbuds in listening to NLF Gameday.

The power did come back on about 9:00 am and I quickly hit the shower and made breakfast. You can't be too sure. The lights have stayed on all day and I just stayed around the house cleaning the garage.

Hopefully the all rain that is coming this week will have a place to go. The ground is saturated and there is standing water everywhere. I have cleaned all the ditches around my house so, I guess I am as ready as I can be.

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