Getting back to normal after a 24-hour power outage.
It was crazy windy here Monday morning, Liberty Bay full of whitecaps, so the outage shouldn't have been a surprise, but somehow it was. Lost power just after noon on Monday, 12:13 p. m. to be precise; it came back on a few minutes later, then went out for good. My home is 100% electric, and I live in an 'unincorporated area,' without municipal water, connection to a sewer system, or access to natural gas, so without electricity I have no running water, no functioning toilets, and of course, no heat. Not to mention a collection of fishes that are ill-equipped to deal with temperature fluctuations.
Fortunately, over the last couple of years I set up a backup system to deal with the outages that are simply a fact of life in this area. My emergency generator is hard-wired into the house, and it is sufficient to power everything except my heating system, and for that I have a wood-burning insert in my fireplace with an electric blower that heats most of the house nicely. The generator is powered by a dedicated 100-gallon propane tank, so I can run the generator continuously for extended periods of time without worrying about fuel. And two cords of wood for the fireplace.
All of these preparations have made outages more of an inconvenience than a threat, and it's really great knowing that all my fishes are safe. That wasn't the case on Mercer Island during the Hanukkah Eve storm of 2006, when I watched on helplessly as many of my fishes died over several days from the cold. Awful.
Power was restored today almost exactly 24 hours later; a big relief, because even under the best of conditions, the outages are stressful. And who needs that!
