On battery power
22:19 PST—A major storm blew into central California today, and this web site has been running on batteries for over 15 hours (the ISP was also down for 5-6 hours today, though the diglloyd.com server remained up). The site will go down within 10-20 hours if power is not restored; it came on briefly for a few minutes tonight, then quit again. I’m sucking up some “juice” writing this on my MacBook Pro.
I do love a good storm (when the storm was blowing in it was wonderfully warm), but no electricity is a real nuisance. It means no heat (furnace fans need electricity), flashlights and candles, minimizing all use of water (our septic/sewer pump needs electricity), melting ice cream in the freezer. It also means neighbors oblivious to the stink and noise of their diesel generators—it would be nice to hear peace and quiet or better yet the howling of the wind through the trees, and the occasional heavy pelting of rain on the roof. Dang, I wish it were snow—now that would be fun.
Being near the hills, we’ve had 6-8 inches of rain in the past 24 hours (but probably much less in the Silicon Valley area). One of my large recycling bins blew into the open storm gutter as I watched, and made a nice stable boat as disappeared from view—but fortunately the bin had already been emptied of its contents by Sanitary Engineers. A morning walk in the storm did require some care, as many trees have been downed, though mainly ones with inherent structural weakness.
