All posts tagged power out

Power Outage 2009 – Again!!!

By | 10 August 2009 | General | No comments
City Hall Lost Their Tree

City Hall Lost Their Tree

6:25:15 PM me: Hang on a minute
6:25:22 PM me: Going to take a picture of the the end of the world
6:25:24 PM vanlandw: i am actually going to be brb’ing soon for the store
6:25:27 PM me: gg
6:25:29 PM vanlandw: and yoiu should take a photo fo the world blowing up
6:25:31 PM vanlandw: but i’ll be on tonight
6:25:33 PM me: k
6:25:39 PM vanlandw: ?
6:28:55 PM vanlandw: what world is ending?
6:28:55 PM me (Autoreply): Nope.

No more power. Damnit.

I was composing my follow up post to my Final Fantasy X post when vanlandw messaged me. Then, in a matter of moments all hell broke loose. It went from violently sunny to violently windy. Rain, heat humidity, wind and chaos slew Grand Haven with a vegennce. While the storm was short lived it did a ton of damage. Over the course of several minutes it managed to rape the trees in my yard and KO enough power lines to leave me sitting here in some kind of tropic stone age hell. Thank the good lord for laptop batteries. Otherwise I am sure I would be feral by now.

The enfuriating thing about this is that we have no lost power in years prior to the earlier storm this year. Thus, that means not once, but twice year summer we have lost power. I am furious, there is no other way to describe it. The air is so hot and sticky using my laptop is all but unbearble. Were it no my only indicator that I lived in the 21st century I would not be using it.

I am going to leave this post as it is now, I think I am going to go for a drive and take some photos of the damage. If I find any good ones I’ll put them up with this post. Ugh, it smells like the fisherman’s worf. Goof grief. I wonder if any fish got blown up…I should check in the trees.

Bah.

UPDATE 2009-08-10:

As you can probably tell by the graphic I stuck in the post, I was able to take some rather interesting photos of the damage. I created a photo set on flickr so you can check out:

August 9th, 2009 Storm

Powerless ’09

By | 20 June 2009 | General | 1 Comment

Today, I experienced a traumatizing event fit for an xkcd comic strip.

A few minutes after returning from Family Video with a video game, the power goes out. This is extremely uncommon, as we are on Grand Haven’s independent grid that nearly never goes down. So, I sat in the dark for a few minutes assuming the power would come back on at any moment (99% of the time is back in in five minutes).

After few minutes of waiting I finally decide to start scrounging around for a flashlight. Jesse found one, and we used it to find another. To be clear, we had enough time to wait a little while, find a flashlight, find another flashlight with dead batteries, find batteries, figure out how to open the flashlight, and put the batteries in the flashlight. And, the power still wasn’t back. This was unheard of.

So, of course the first thing I want to do is write a post about the experience. But, ultimately I decided not to, because I obviously could not post it since I had not internet access. But, more importantly, my laptop gets quite warm so I only use it when I can have a fan blowing on me to prevent my brain from boiling. No electrify = no fan.

At this point, I am figuring that I can survive without internet access for a little, because certainly the power should be coming on at any moment. I figured that it would be a good time to get a little catch up reading done. So, I grab my kindle only to say “battery is empty.” Ugh. I swear, whenever I want to use that thing the battery is dead. I really need to remember to turn off wireless when I’m not using it.

Next, I figured I would grab my iPod Touch, and see if everyone’s power was down by scanning for wireless networks. After that I was going to listen to some tunes. That thing was so dead that it wouldn’t even show the “charge immediately” screen. I swear, when the internet goes down, or in this case the power, all my electronics instantly die.

My last resort was to pull out an analog book, and attempt to read with one of those little book lights. I haven’t tried to read with one of those in ages. The light I use works pretty good with the kindle, but doesn’t work to well with a regular book, unfortunately. I managed to get through a chapter but it caused to much eye strain I was feeling sick to my stomach. At this point an hour had pasted.

So at this point I’m searching the house for a length of rope, and trying to figure out which branch would hold my weight the best.

After 90 minutes of unbearable horror, Jesse and I went to Wal-Mart. We wondered around for a half hour or so, and picked up some flashlights and portable fans. We got back to the house at a little after 12:30. Thankfully, during the time we were out the power came back on.

According to the blinking light on the stove, the power had come back on 11 minutes before we walked through the door. In order words, over two hours from the time it went out. Unfortunately for us, those two hours felt like an eternity.