wiredfool

From here:

it’s rainy and 50, then snowy and 32, and then perhaps finally sunny, but only 28. Too bad we’re not allowed to mix and match…

And a high wind warning. So, over the next few days, the temp will be between 50 and below freezing. We’ll have rain and snow, wind and sun. In some combinations.

And the replacement battery for my UPS is out for delivery with UPS. Its a race…

Update: and it’s UPS by a nose, delivering the batteries 2 minutes before a power outage, which this time only lasted about 30 minutes. We’re back, and batteries are charging now. I doubt that we’ll get anywhere near a full charge before the next outage.

Dropped @ 12:20 am ish, We’re on the other side at a coffee shop.

Yay. Again.

Update – And back up at 7:10 pm. 19 hours down, and the month is only 140 hours old. Need to get cracking to get that one nine of reliability back.

It’s windy out and the power’s flickering.

Yay.

It’s not out yet, but the UPS running the internets isn’t doing as well anymore.

Update — We didn’t lose power despite the flickreing and the downed tree branches in the lane. The UPS’s batteries are gone now, so there are new ones on the way.

It’s back, final tally was 62 hours out. We were preparing for another day or two without power by getting in some more appropriate food and moving the email server to someplace other than at the end of my dsl line.

It wasn’t really that bad — we had tepid water the whole time in the main house, and my office/cottage had hot water for showers. We had heat, and the ability to cook. Light was candles after about 4pm, and we lost the perishables in the fridge. But I suspect that the chest freezer would have lasted a week, since it’s in an unheated garage and it was near freezing the whole time.

Now, to get in that final amazon order…

Noticed on the front page of the PI last night that “Some portions of Whidbey Island may be without power for 5 days”

Well, we’re halfway there…

We’re sitting in a coffee shop on the mainland after a short visit for lunch and errands. It’s 4pm on Saturday, 43 hours after power went off, and I don’t see the lights coming on over on the island.

But there’s power and internet in the cafe at least.

Supposedly Freeland had power this morning, so either we’re not seeing it or it hadn’t made it down to Clinton yet.

According to PSE, 3/4 of their 700k customers lost power, including all of Island county.  250k of those customers have power now.

Yay.

The biggest storm in 13 years is hitting Seattle and winds on the island are projected to be 40-60 mph with gusts to 80. I’m guessing that the estimates are for the Coupeville/Ebey’s landing area, which has a straight shot through the Strait of Juan De Fuca to the Pacific.

But power for the south end of the island goes by there.

So… not really expecting power to last all night.

And poof, there it went at 9:10. It gave a valiant fight, flickering on and off several times just after 9. But we’re probably down for the duration now.

Update – 4:00 pm: Still down. Not really expecting it to come back on for a while.

About 2 years ago (well 2 years and three days ago) I got a new camera, the first thing I posted with it was this picture (but there are earlier ones floating about). 26000 pictures later, I still think it’s an amazing camera and a great leap forward from the point and shoots that I was using.

7 Years ago, (and a little, it was Thanksgiving time) I started this weblog. There have been something like 1000 posts, 500 of them just pictures, and 20 some odd image galleries with another several hundred pictures. And only just in the last few months have I been able to post to the front page more than once a day.

My previous record of keeping up anything resembling a website/diary/anything was a few months, so there’s got to be something quite different about this whole weblogging thing.

After 33 hours, power came back at about 1am.

Yay! Hot Water! Refridgeration! Light! Charged Laptops! Internets!

Power’s down again. We’ve had about 95% uptime on the power grid this month…

Snow’s beautiful though, and it’s quiet enough to hear the tree branches breaking from the weight.

Update – This one was about 9:20 am to 1:30.

Update 2 – Down again at 4pm. There’s about 8″ of snow on the ground, and more forecast for the next 24 hours.