Off-Line

I've been in the dark for over 24 hours now.  I was going to blog on Sunday morning about how I spent Saturday afternoon and evening helping my big, burly, goatee-d bald male friend sew fuzzy pink pajamas for his little girl, but early in the wee hours of Sunday morning I had no option.  The power went out.

We've been dealing with some pretty strong winds here in southeast Michigan, as a result of the weird and wild weather.  After all that snow recently, the temps on Saturday were into the 50F-range!  Crazy.  We've had fog and rain and incredible amounts of water from melting snow...and then the cold front came in, with straight-line winds over 50mph.  I was lying in bed on Sunday morning listening to the wind that had woken me up, and could hear the storm windows squeaking as they tried to pry themselves off the house.  It was scary - I was sure a tree was going to come down!  I have a CO detector in the upstairs hallway, so it screeched when the power blinked out, screamed a long time when it came back on, then screeched again when the power went out for good.  I reached over and called the power company hotline to report the outage, thinking if I called early I would be higher on the list.  Ha!

By 9am there were 110,000 people out of power in metro Detroit.

By 11am there were 180,000 people out of power.

By 3pm, when my parents came over to hook up a generator, I didn't even ask.

So I've been out of power since yesterday morning, had no cable (which means no phone, since I have a cable phone), and no hot water (high efficiency gas hot water heater doesn't run without the little electric fan running on top of it!) except for the few hours a day when the generator is hooked up.  It has spent the day at a friend of my parents, heating their house and chilling their fridge, and will come back this evening to do the same duty at my house.  It's big enough to run the furnace (gas) and fridge, but not enough to run all the normal evening power-sucking appliances and lights, so we're living lightly, and bathing quickly.

On the other hand, the neighborhood is quiet, houses are dark, and stars are visible.  It's kind of nice...

till you hear all the generator motors running.