Our house is finally back online after the big wind storm on Sunday. The electric service to our house was fixed around 8:30pm last night. Others in the area are still out of service, but things are slowly coming back to normal.
We had sustained 70-75mph winds for close to 6 hours on Sunday, which blew down trees, branches, and, of course, power lines. Me and a couple friends of mine drove around Sunday night during the storm hunting down parts of the grid that were still “live”. We had to travel close to 30 miles to find places to eat and gas stations that were still pumping gas. We passed a KFC during our trek where the drive-thru line was close to 45 cars long. We stopped at a couple restaurants to find that the wait to be seated was over 2 hours. The gas stations that were still pumping gas looked like the gas rush of the 1970’s, with cars lined up for about 2 miles in some places. We ended up finding a grocery that was running on a generator, bought some assorted meats, and then went back to my friend’s house and grilled out in the dark. The only light we had was a couple LED flashlights and an oriental lamp powered by batteries.
It was surreal. In high school, my friends and I, wrote and drew a comic book that starred ourselves. It was set in an apocalyptic future where we battled flesh-eating zombies and scoured the country in our heart-windowed van looking for suitable, untainted females with which to repopulate the world. Sunday night felt like we were living out our storyline.
My Dad’s house wasn’t hit too bad, but his vinyl siding was ripped off.
Despite the pains of being so reliant on electricity, we did have some fun. Our daughter decided to see if the winds were strong enough to carry our youngest away, so she hooked him up with some plastic bags.
He had fun, and we had fun watching him blow across the yard and fall down a few times.
There were rumors going around that we probably wouldn’t have our electric service restored until later in the week, or possibly into the weekend. So, I needed Internet access to be able to work. I jumped out to the Verizon store yesterday and picked up the Verizon broadband USB adapter (UM150).
The UM150 works well. Once connected to the Verizon network, access is very speedy. I’ve never had a need for this module until now, but now I’m glad that I picked it up and I know I’ll use it in the future. You use the Verizon VZAccess software to connect, but once connected its just like sitting, connected to the LAN.
