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    Winter Wonderland!

    Well, not so much.  Our first storm of the season was a whopper.  It started out as rain and then shifted to wet, heavy snow.  Weather reports said that accumulations would vary based on the elevation and could amount to as much as a foot.  We were as ready as we could be, so when bedtime came, that was that.

    At around 4 AM, I was awakened by a whump sound like when a tree comes down.  Since it wasn’t followed by a crash, whatever it was hadn’t hit the house.  That meant it could wait until morning, so I rolled over and went back to sleep. About five minutes later, I was roused again by the incessant beeping of multiple battery backup power supplies all going off together on our office computers down in the basement.  Not good.  Looking all around the house, I was relieved to see that it wasn’t one of our trees that had come down.  Instead, it was one belonging to our neighbor across the street.  Although no homes were damaged, it had split in half and had come down squarely across the road, taking the power lines with it, completely blocking the road. 

    I went down to the computer room to shut down everything and noticed that while we had no power, the Internet was still up.  So, before shutting everything down completely, I logged onto the power company’s site to report the outage.  Once that was done, I shut the systems down completely and then went out to the garage to do the same for the computer there.  Without knowing for how long the power might be out, I organized a few things. 

    I have a Bluetooth boom-box speaker with a battery big enough to power it for 24 hours which also has a USB port for charging a cell phone.  If we didn’t use the speaker part, it would keep our phones charged for quite a number of days.  I also have one of those survival radios that can run on either regular battery power or its internal battery, maintained by a built-in, hand-cranked dynamo. It also has an adapter to charge the cell phones if necessary.  So, communications were handled.  We also have a number of candle lanterns and spare candles.  Lighting when it got dark would be no problem.

    Next was heat.  Although the furnace is gas, it has electronic controls.  So, with the power out we would have no heat from that.  We installed an unvented gas space heater in the basement for emergencies years ago.  Running it on the lowest setting poses no danger and would keep the pipes from freezing and the house somewhat comfortable. We would just have to dress warmer.  Check.

    Cooking was the last situation to address.  We have gas appliances and had running water.  I took a cooler and placed it outside to come to ambient temperature.  When cold enough, we’d open and raid the fridges one time to get whatever items we wanted to use in the short term.  The goal was to keep the fridges as cool as possible until the power came back on by instead working out of the cooler stored just outside the side door.  Though I couldn’t use the oven due to the electric ignition being inoperable, I could still light the top burners using a click-stick butane grill lighter.  The best part was that I still have my one-cup cone filter for making coffee, so a pan of boiling water set us up with hot coffee for me and tea for Jan.  We had plenty of canned supplies too.  When the weather cleared, I would also be able to use our natural gas grill out on the deck if necessary. Cooking would be no problem.  So, we waited it out.

    All told, we received about a foot of snow and the power was out for about 12 hours.  Our area was hit fairly hard as the crew of linemen that repaired damage near us were from Harrisburg, PA about two and a half hours away.  Apparently, it was a case of “all hands on deck.”  We’re now back up to speed with no damage.  An adventure for sure, just not one I want to repeat for a while.

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