Hot and humid, but less so. It got up to 99F in the shade and it was scorching in the sun. Waves of heat coming off the grass in the yard.
Spent the day working on the projects list. Got a bunch of stuff done. Nothing major, but making progress where I can.
Got some new names of contractors to try.
Then we finished up, ate dinner, and had friends over for movies and drinks. Watched “Pixels” and enjoyed it.
Just a few minutes after the movie ended, we, and a bunch of our neighbors lost power.
In our neighborhood, it started on our street, starting with my house… and other places around the lake also went dark, with about 104 subscribers affected.
We were back up in almost exactly one hour from reporting the outage. Of course you need to use the website to report an outage. Good thing my wife’s phone had service without the booster….
A big UPS will be headed up here for the networking and comms. And another big one for the freezer, with backup power moving up the list.
Oh, and a bunch of cheap LED lanterns will be headed up here too. We all have our personal flashlights, and I’ve got a couple of headlamps, so we were good, but a few of the little lanterns that are cheap copies of the Streamlight Siege are very handy. Just don’t drop them.
I’ve realized that my focus has been on getting the place ready as a family vacation spot, and prepping it up has come after that, and slowly. That balance will shift a bit starting this week. If we’re here, we need the same level of backup we have at home, and for the same reasons.
As an aside, the two most useful things I’ve brought up with me are batteries and my jar of miscellanious hardware. I brought a big pack of each type of battery and I’ve been tearing through them. So much stuff uses batteries, and a lot of the tools, remotes, radios, and other things need fresh batteries. I’ve even brought up some eneloops and their charger because I was using so many batteries.
The hardware is all the random screws and nuts I collect while fixing other things, tearing them apart, or stripping them before getting rid of them. I throw all the hardware into a coffee can and when that’s full, I start another. If I have a bunch of similar stuff from one project, I put it in a peanut butter jar and keep it separate. I figured I’d be fixing random things here so I threw one coffee can worth of hardware into a box for use here. I’ve been dumping that out, and sorting through it for replacement parts, screws, and nuts, since I got up here. Crazy useful.
Today’s plan is more work, a quick dip, and head home in the afternoon. It’s been a great weekend despite the challenges but it will be good to be home too.
It’s much easier to stack it up at home… and I still need to. So do you.
nick