Well, that was interesting

If you aren't in the Pacific Northwest, it may have escaped notice that we had a nasty storm late last week that knocked out power to a million homes.  Now, we have had storms before that downed power lines, but this was a doozy.  It was the equivalent to an Inauguration Day storm in 1993, but  caused significantly more damage.

So here's why I think God hates me on a completely personal level:

• I started getting sick on Wednesday night, nothing too bad, but I was starting to feel it.
• My friend was getting me a perishable gift delivered on Thursday (arranged before notice of the storm)
• My first day of vacation was due to start after a half-day on Thursday

My friend comes over Thursday evening and gives me the gift and it's about as perishable as possible - Lobstergram. It's a box containing two live 2lb lobsters, other assorted fresh seafood and everything you need to cook and eat them.  It's a pretty damn cool gift and one I'm looking forward to sharing with my girlfriend on Friday, even though I'm starting to feel a bit worse. As soon as my friend leaves I read the booklet that comes with the box and it advises cooking the lobsters immediately. I start to fill up a pot with water and the power goes out.

Okay, so I didn't expect it out longer than a day, which was the longest it had ever been out before. But, it got pretty damned cold. I broke out the candles, lit up a log in the fireplace and tried unsuccessfully to sleep. All during the night I could hear the wind ripping through the trees and listened to branches and debris rattling against the building.

By the time I woke up on Friday my chest cold was really bad, I thought I was going to hack up a lung.  A quick look outside showed serious damage.  I fired up my Zune and heard on the radio that the windstorm had caused outages across western Washington. Virtually every city around me was completely blacked out for miles and miles.  As I sat in my freezing apartment,  I was hoping against hope that it would be a brief outage.

By Friday night, I was sick as a dog with nowhere to go (everyone I knew was also out of power), the news was reporting hotels with power were already sold out.  And to make it even better, my girlfriend drove into town, passing blacked out cities along the way, on an empty gas tank.

After another fairly sleepless night, we had to go in search for a gas can and gas for her car. We drove around Saturday to find gas cans sold out everywhere (no surprise there) and finally had to drive up to Bothell to her parents place to borrow a can.  We also found an open gas station along the way to fill it up. The temperature dropped into the 30s that night and it actually made me forget how nice it was to be warm.

My girlfriend left Sunday morning to head home and I was fed up. I couldn't sleep, was freakin' cold as hell, exhausted, sick as a dog, the seafood was spoiled in the fridge and my first days of vacation sucked ass. Power was restored at work, so I headed in there to get warm and decided to sleep there. Which mainly meant, hanging out in my office until about 7:00am Monday before heading home to find that my power was back up again.

I was so tired at that point that I turned up the heat, took a very long hot shower and slept until early this morning. I hope that doesn't happen again for another ten years.

Comments

[slapdummy]

Well, I didn't have any of the Chef Boyardee (although I bought some a couple of days later when the power was still out from a store with a generator). It's not that disturbing, it's called being prepared (or maybe well-organized paranoia).

[Tom]

Did I mention how disturbing it is to hear that you have an MRE stash? If you want ravioli so badly, bust out a can of sterno and heat up some Chef Boyardee.

[slapdummy]

Did I mention that I had to break into my MRE stash for food. I bought some with the heaters. Captain Country Chicken was horrible, but the beef ravioli wasn't bad.

[Tom]

That's a pretty sorry tale. It's funny too, because I seem to remember being sick as a dog during the Inauguration Day storm in '93.