No post yesterday, but I had a reason

I didn’t write yesterday, but I had a reason. We had no power for most of the day. The Northeast has been hit with a massive storm ranging from snow to rain, but both accompanied by very strong winds. That’s what hit us – the wind. The snow and rain missed us.

We lost power for just over eight hours, from about 11:30 am until about 7:45 pm in the evening. We only had a very brief 15-minute recovery at about 2:30 pm in the afternoon, but it didn’t hold. Fortunately, the sun was shining brightly all day and that made the temperature feel less frigid.

I know I probably could have written on the laptop using the battery, but the last time I tried to use it that way something happened and messed up the configuration and settings. It took me one day to get it back to normal. I could have also used pen and paper. So I really have no excuse.

When the wife got home from work she wanted to move things from the refrigerator to portable coolers, so while she ran out with the car to buy ice I cleaned the two coolers from the garage. Oh, and that was another thing. We couldn’t open the garage door to put the new car inside.

When she returned with the ice we emptied both the freezer and then the fridge part of anything we wanted to save. There was some expensive meat – beef tenderloin for one thing – that we didn’t want to go bad. We put the coolers out on the front porch so everything would stay cold.

We had about a dozen and a half of eggs so we hard-boiled them; I had two this morning. And we had a package of frozen ready-to-eat shrimp in the freezer, so we ran them under water for several minutes and had shrimp cocktail while we waited for a delivery order for dinner. She had a calzone and I had my normal Italian cold sub.

When the power did return it took us about 45 minutes to move everything back in – we cleaned out the fridge with anything we thought may have gone bad, as well as washed down the inside – and washed dishes and pans from the eggs and shrimp.

The last time we lost power was back in 2012 when we had a major storm come through from Ohio and West Virginia, again straight-line winds and thunderstorms. It was called a derecho (from the Spanish meaning “straight”). We lost power that time for eight hours. 

But others were out for more than two weeks. Again, we lucked out.

(Tahoma 12)