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By Mark D, February 5, 2011 10:06 am

So I live on the edge of the Philly Suburbs. I have been living in the same place for a good chunk of time now. We have seen a LOT of crazy storms come and go. We’ve had power blink once or twice, but never a long outage. Well apparently the freezing rain was enough to do everything in Wednesday morning as the power was out. Of course being the maniac I am, I was up at 5AM or so when it went out for good. I woke up at 4PM and went to check the clock on the stove. I realize it’s not on and I think “Oh, that’s right it needs to be reset… unless all Power is out” I open the fridge and see no lights “well powers out”.

I grab a book and start reading it, and the roomie comes home about 45 minutes later. The first thing she asks is if the Power is out and I say yes. Then she says that both neighbors have power. So I take a look outside, and it ends up that our house is older then the rest that face the main road. So they didn’t have power along that road at the time and they just put this house into the power with the houses behind it. Those power lines are sandwiched between two rows of houses now and go out into the woods. So its probably sort of surprising we haven’t had a bad power outage yet.

That night we see the guys working on the transformer from our porch, and even see an outside light go on at another house that had no power. Figure no big deal, the power will go back on soon. Of course this is after we had already freaked because we had just bought a ton of groceries and frozen stuff. In a brilliant move we put the frozen stuff outside on the ice and snow covered porch. My moment of genius? I was about to say let’s go to Wawa for some ice, but I thought about it and just filled up some bags with snow.

So get through another day and there’s again no signs of power coming back on. It ended up that since the power lines go through the backyards of multiple houses they aren’t exactly easy to get at when surrounded by ice, frozen snow and trees. I lose all patience and decide to break out my old BBQ grill to boil some water so I can make ramen. Which must have looked interesting for anyone passing by as I had the small grill setup on the front lawn. It was also nighttime and since I didn’t have real charcoal I used a bunch of woodchips and a lot of lighter fluid. It was just enough to make one bowl of ramen, which was fine by me.

So my neighbor finally gets tired of waiting and decides to setup a power generator for the house. Unfortunately it’s on for maybe all of 45 minutes before the power comes back on. Fortunately the power comes back on with plenty of time for the Roomie to catch that night’s Flyers game.

Lesson learned? Come hell or high water your power will stay up, until a freezing rain appears. Or unless your power is setup completely asininely then a bit of freezing rain will take it out for over 24 hours.

This took longer then I thought it would. Mostly because the cat that doesn’t like me keeps demanding my attention. He does that by sitting on my keyboard the second I take my hands off the keys. I think it’s an evil plot by him to make sure he gets into my blogs/videos by being annoying.

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By Mark D, January 16, 2011 1:22 pm

This is Avi:

He’s usually pretty funny in the snow. He hops like a bunny when moving around with it, and when it’s the first snow of the year he’ll go really nuts like he forgot what snow is. Unfortunately when your filming him, he decides the most interesting thing in the world is the bushes outside your steps. Mostly because there’s a few bunnies that live in those bushes and he can smell them.

So if you want to watch Avi sniff around some bushes for a minute, feel free to watch the video. Thankfully in the 2nd one he’s a bit funnier as he tries to catch Snowballs:

And the snowballs: