Post Irene

There's plenty to post about, but since the power is out at the Alexandria house and I am updating from the iPhone, we'll make a quick status report here.

The power went out at about 1am when one of the transformers blew. I was in the Valley, so Mary went out to get our generator going - we bought and installed it to make sure the sump pump never goes out - definitely worked out that way this time. Special thanks to neighbor Alan who helped her; I got back as soon as I could on Sunday.

Now we are recognizing the carbon footprint of this decision, which adds about 2 gallons of gas consumption every 8 hours. We'll figure out how to balance this, but in the meantime we have offered freezer and refrigerator space to the neighbors, and are sharing the ice we made up in advance with them.

Dominion has estimated our power will be back on tonight. So we will have had an outage of around 48-50 hours...that could have been much worse and it goes without saying we're lucky at the relatively light damage from this storm.

There's also a nice irony to it all, as 2003's Isabel knocked out power on the block across the street. They were in the dark seven days, but have been spared this time.