Another power failure (10 hours)

OK, this is getting old :-) We were so happy this morning when the electicity was restored. The food in the refrigerator was still OK, I was able to make some morning espresso, and with the roads in bad shape, I began another day at the laptop working from home. Then around 10:30am a heavy, ice-encrusted branch from a neighbor's tree broke off and dropped onto some live power wires. The branch immediately began to smoke heavily, with little flames dancing here and there. After a minute or two one of the power wires snapped, with a second breaking a very short while later.

So after 10 hours, we thankfully have power again - in time for a warm night's sleep. We are so lucky, and I feel very grateful to the folks who work such long hours in pretty miserable conditions to restore the power when the storms do their worst.

Here's a couple of pictures from today's events.

Power failure (13 hours)

Yesterday the power went out around 3pm. We've had some snow and a LOT of freezing rain the past couple of days. There's about a one-inch coating on everything outside - I can walk on top of the snow and the ice crust does not break. Well I was working from home (since the office building was closed), and then at about 3pm ...BOOM! and the power went out.

Just before 4am this morning the power came back on, which was wonderful, because that meant not only could I fire up the PCs again, but I could also brew some morning espresso! :-)

So here's what we did after the power went out.

Good day for working at home

It's hard to tell from this picture (click on it for the full-size image) from earlier this morning, but it was - and is - snowing hard! Well, 'round these parts, we don't get too much snow. We're more used to rain, and showers, and drizzle, and sprinkles, and several others words that all equate to wet. So when we do get real snow, things kind of stop. And on days like today, when the snow is coupled with ice, well, then it's a real mess.

On most work days I drive to a Park-and-Ride lot (commuters park their cars and take mass transit), and ride the Portland TriMet MAX train into downtown Portland, Oregon to work. Not today. The electric train is able to push through some of the snow, but trains are getting stuck on a mild hill they need to climb just before a bridge that goes across the Willamette River downtown. Oh, and the switches on the tracks are frozen, so that's not really a good thing either.

OK, time to get back to the laptop. Good thing I work with Lotus Notes and can work with local replicas of all my needed databases, connecting every hour or so to get/send any updates. :-)

Dramatic reduction in Telemarketer calls

We have received ZERO telemarketer calls since Christmas. We are signed up on the Do Not Call Registry here in the US, and are registered with the Telephone Preference Service - as well as the other preference services from the Direct Marketing Association. Nontheless, we typically would receive at least a couple of solicitation calls each day. Well, my sister-in-law gave me a TeleZapper for Christmas, and I plugged it in as soon as I opened the package. We have noticed no solicitation calls since. I should mention here that we block anonymous calls, and we also use Caller ID to see who's calling before answering. If we don't see a name we know, we let it go to the answering machine. Well, now when the answering machine picks up (or when we pick up the receiver) a tone is played that makes predictive dialer machines think that our number is disconnected. We used to get a lot of "empty" messages on our machine - error tones when the solicitation caller hung up after our outgoing message. No more :-)

2004 - Beautiful start to the year

Update later in the afternoon - My son is home from college (going to school in Tampa), and was hoping to get some snow during his winter break. The wish has been granted. Here he is by the new snowman:

Here's a pic looking out our front door on the first morning of 2004: