Ha-ha! I just found out that my brief message that my blog was suspended until my power in Maryland was restored did better than most of my regular posts.. What a way to start off an RDO weekend. (I.e., a biweekly day off where I work 9 hours each M/Th. Ironically my first IT job ran a 4 x 10 hour workday-Friday off schedule.)
I don't do anything great on RDO's. Typically I'll sleep in, do laundry at a local laundromat, schedule things like haircuts or doctor's visits and run some errands. Usually the laundromat isn't as busy as on the weekend; one of my pet peeves in life is waiting for some absent customer to unload their stuff, freeing up a dryer. I always set alarms within the last minute of the cycle...
I had seen warnings of a wind advisory/alert; I wasn't traveling on vulnerable bridges, etc., so I really didn't anticipate the consequences. While I was a UWM professor, I decided to go visit 3 of my siblings on East Coast. I remember I got stopped driving through Indiana while battling the wind in my compact Ford Futura; the patrolman thought I was drifting in my lane and let me go.
The laundromat is at an important merge/intersection of a couple of important local streets; I typically loop from my apartment counter-clockwise, when I encountered a highly unusual pile up of traffic in the other direction and had to wait for a yield arrow to cross.
Usually I had found a dozen or so other customers on Friday's; it seemed slacker than usual, but it wasn't until I was drying my load when I noticed I was the only one in the place besides the attendant/manager. A friend of hers entered the place and said something to the effect they had closed a major bridge a few miles east because of the wind storm; I gathered from context that the manager was supposed to pick up her grandson (?) from school, and she didn't know an alternate route. Then she got a call from a prospective customer asking whether they still had power. The drying cycle ended, and I was in the middle of folding my clothes when the store had a massive power hiccup. I have no idea what that meant if I had been in a washer or dryer cycle. I was beginning to think something wicked was coming.
I had started one of my rant pieces (on Trump, of course) that morning and hadn't noticed any power issues before my laundry run. I had been toying with the idea of picking up some groceries vs. continuing my cycle home when I saw a massive traffic jam heading east. And part of the problem was the intersection I normally crossed going home had a traffic light off and a lady cop was directing traffic. The last thing I wanted was traffic jams to and from shopping, so I scratched that and headed home.
And I found the power off. Had it been reported? I went to the leasing office to find they had bailed because of the outage. No problem, I'll just call them. Only the utility was not in my contact list. Okay, no problem: I'll just use my smartphone's Internet. But something was seriously hosed with . All sorts of weird things are going on. I tried to call my Mom (who I knew would be concerned) and the call isn't connecting. She tries calling back, and it's going into voicemail. I texted one of my brothers, who was able to confirm my utility was aware of the issue in my area. Good; at least texts are working. I find one of those cylindrical mini-power banks which charges my phone to full (and apparently exhausted itself). I get an alert overnight which seems to be a call for responders to deal with motorists stranded without fuel that led me to think, where were all these people going? I knew I flirted with the idea of finding some hotel with power, but I only had half a tank of gas and didn't know the perimeter of the outages. For example, I knew from news that Delaware and even Frederick, maybe an hour's drive west, had bee hit. I had a Stanley flashlight (USB charged), but it had been weeks since I last charged it and it didn't have much juice left. I do have an auto USB charger.
Food wasn't a major issue because I've got boxes of protein bars/cookies that I normally carry for lunch at work, canned fish, etc.. But I also remembered this morning that I have a functioning gas (vs. electric) stove. I also realized that my ISP had WIFI available and two laptops with limited battery life. My utility has little to say other than to confirm outages in my area have been reported, they have personnel on the ground ready to get things ready as soon as (wind conditions) permit. I'm scanning news reports for anything new and see one demoralizing story they could see restore activities dragging well until next week.
So my outage ended roughly around 8:30 PM tonight (I have a floor lamp near my bed which I had turned on), at least a 30-odd hour outage. My thermostat showed the apartment at 58; besides the sheer boredom of the outage, it was trying to keep warm overnight.
Hopefully things are back to normal, and I get caught up on the blog.
