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My house still has no electricity.
I haven't opened the fridge. Everything in there is certainly no good now. Sometime when I have natural light to work with, I'll empty the whole thing. My neighbors on the left have already given up and emptied theirs. They had to; they'd been opening it. They can't afford to eat out for a week like I can. No one in that house has a job.
The pool didn't overflow... at least not into the living room.
The house gets quite cold at night. If there's no power by tonight, I'm breaking out the camping gear. Y'know, I gotta wonder whether there's a local law against insulation. I've lived five different places since moving to the Bay Area and none of them were insulated worth a damn. No wonder we are such power hogs. (I have windows that don't close. I'm not kidding; they don't close. Where I grew up, anyone who created such a design would be taken out and shot.)
This is a personal record for me; this is the longest I've ever been without electricity. In the blizzard of 1978 a good chunk of New England declared a state of emergency that lasted well over a week: no civilian use of roads, people were trapped in office buildings and surviving from the vending machines, etc etc... and the power didn't stay out this long. A few years ago I was in the Outer Banks, North Carolina, when a hurricane came through and wiped out anything that wasn't nailed down. Homes were destroyed, roads had to be excavated from under several feet of sand... and the power didn't stay out this long. God help Sunnyvale if it ever gets any real weather.
I haven't opened the fridge. Everything in there is certainly no good now. Sometime when I have natural light to work with, I'll empty the whole thing. My neighbors on the left have already given up and emptied theirs. They had to; they'd been opening it. They can't afford to eat out for a week like I can. No one in that house has a job.
The pool didn't overflow... at least not into the living room.
The house gets quite cold at night. If there's no power by tonight, I'm breaking out the camping gear. Y'know, I gotta wonder whether there's a local law against insulation. I've lived five different places since moving to the Bay Area and none of them were insulated worth a damn. No wonder we are such power hogs. (I have windows that don't close. I'm not kidding; they don't close. Where I grew up, anyone who created such a design would be taken out and shot.)
This is a personal record for me; this is the longest I've ever been without electricity. In the blizzard of 1978 a good chunk of New England declared a state of emergency that lasted well over a week: no civilian use of roads, people were trapped in office buildings and surviving from the vending machines, etc etc... and the power didn't stay out this long. A few years ago I was in the Outer Banks, North Carolina, when a hurricane came through and wiped out anything that wasn't nailed down. Homes were destroyed, roads had to be excavated from under several feet of sand... and the power didn't stay out this long. God help Sunnyvale if it ever gets any real weather.
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(It was almost 70 yesterday in concord, I had all the windows open. and even with the cloudy weather, the solar panels were plenty for my shower this morning... you'd think that would be more common out there...) _Mark_
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Nah, there's just that they took all of the money in the budget that in an New England house that would have been spent on isolation, and spent it on earthquake-proofing instead. =)
God help New England if we have that that earthquake that the geologists keep talking about.....
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There are days when I muse about what it would take to get off the grid entirely. (Then, of course, I look at my bank balance and decide it's time to quit musing and get my ass into the office.)
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Heh, yeah :-). Although these stooopid windows surely cost a bit more to manufacture and install than a simple pane of glass.
God help New England if we have that that earthquake that the geologists keep talking about.....
Indeed. You'd get the chance to rebuild from scratch, with all-new, modern earthquake-safe designs... :-/
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They went up fast and they went up cheap. Built by folks not from califonia.
"California is warm right? Let's save some $$ and not insulate them."
When looking at new construction a couple of years ago, the builders stressed the instulation and good windows. Save $$ on A/C in the summer and heating in the winter.
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I also wonder about the tradeoffs involved in burying the power lines. The small neighborhood-level feeds are all aboveground where I live. I would have guessed that some of that is related to earthquakes, but I see that many communities in the Bay Area bury more of their power lines. Obviously that's not something that's easy to change at this point, but on my fourth day without electricity I start to think "yah but this system is broken" and I start to wish that the work involved weren't prohibitive.
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Of course, I have never heard of a case where public transportation ever paid for itself... the question is what to use to subsidize it. I'll start by taxing groups of thousands who each travel in individual cars in order to view something that is televised. Double tax for anyone who travels in the exit-only lane until the last possible moment and then holds everyone up while trying to move left by cutting someone off.
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The deep-cycle battereis are used for the very few electric devices that I cant find alternatives for....two-way radios and emergency lighting. Assuming normal radio use and minimal heavy lighting, batteries last for about a week...they can be recharged off of several sources.
When I move to my own Big Piece Of Middle O' Nowhere, the house will have seamless stand-alone power capability.
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That's what I dream of. Complete stand-alone... and no buying fuel, either; that's worse than being on the grid. Solar or wind, I'm guessing. Haven't researched enough to know exactly what I want it to look like. Whatever it is won't fit where I am now.
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Playing "LJ catch up" this morning so I hope your power is back on.
This is a personal record for me; this is the longest I've ever been without electricity. In the blizzard of 1978 a good chunk of New England declared a state of emergency that lasted well over a week: no civilian use of roads, people were trapped in office buildings and surviving from the vending machines, etc etc... and the power didn't stay out this long.
*blink blink*
Ah remember it well. I still believe that this storm lead to the irrational fear that when the weather person says snow, that there is a run on milk, bread, toilet paper in every Shaws, Almacs, Stop and Shop, and IGA in New England.
Would take a bigger storm than we had to break the "out of power" record for me. It was 6 days (heck we lived in the "woods") during that storm. Got bad enough that a couple of the neighbors hiked into town on show shoes to get milk, etc.
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Would take a bigger storm than we had to break the "out of power" record for me. It was 6 days (heck we lived in the "woods") during that storm. Got bad enough that a couple of the neighbors hiked into town on show shoes to get milk, etc.
I remember hiking for groceries. Family of five, each person with one bag to carry back, trundling through deep fluffy snow. My mother was adroit enough to open a package of Rolo candies (chocolate covered caramel) while carrying her bag, and when I ate the candy she gave me, I lost a baby tooth in it. I had to wait until I got home to put down my grocery bag and take the tooth out of my mouth. :-)