Since yesterday I spent my LJ entry talking about my Quest for Yet Another McCoy Audio, I neglected to write about my Exciting Adventure with No Electricity!

Sunday night, around 1am, we got a storm from hell. So I got up and shut all the windows, turned on the A/C, turned off my computer (after checking on Kings Of Chaos and my little elves) and returned to bed. I tried to fall asleep and after awhile, noticed that, between the lightning flashes, it seemed darker. Maybe the streetlight across the way was out? I looked behind me, and sure enough, my clock was out too. Since we’d had a bout of no electricity recently (welcome to Spring!) I still had my emergency flashlight and travel alarm by the bed. I set the travel alarm to ring at 6:15am and tried to sleep.

The morning comes and I awake to a phone call. Mom’s on the line and tells me that the power is out and she was afraid I might not wake up in time. I said that I’d set my travel alarm when the power went out. “Oh, for what time?” she asked. I told her and she replied “But it’s after 6:30 now.” I thanked her and checked my travel alarm. Gee, I’d set it an hour early, apparently, the other night. It said it was 5:40am. So I get up and get into the bathroom. Leo reluctantly followed (which should have been my second giveaway) and as I sat on the toilet, I looked at my watch. It seemed to agree with my travel alarm. Oh… A final check was in the kitchen – I couldn’t read the numbers on my bathroom scale (surely you keep *your* bathroom scale in the kitchen?) which I usually can at that time of the morning. “Ah, thanks mom” I thought, as I chuckled and headed back to bed.

A bit before 6:15 (the *real* 6:15) I got another phone call. “I’m sorry,” she says as I answer. I just laughed. She tried to blame dad, but he did tell her it was 5:30 when she woke up and asked him for the time. She figured it couldn’t be that early, so he said “well, then it’s 6:30” and that’s when she called. Still, I’m glad she called – it’s nice that she thought to help out.

I got up for real this time. And got yet another phone call. I thought, as I was heading for the phone, “bet this is Mary Jo, telling me there’s a delay.” Sure enough, we were on a 2 hour delay. It was nearly 7am and there still was no power at the school or throughout most of town. I finished getting ready and decided, since I had no computer to occupy myself, I’d go next door and chat with the parentals. Turns out, since dad couldn’t make mom coffee without electricity, they were going out for breakfast. I’d already had breakfast, but I couldn’t say no to second breakfast. We went to Steak and Shake and I had an egg, cheese & bacon sammich on a bagel. And water. It was yummy.

We got home and found that the power was back on. So I raced home to check on my Elves and spend my gold, then I headed on to the school. Where I had 3 servers off, 1 with a hard drive error message (even though it really didn’t have a hard drive error) and the other two servers OK. I got everyone running again and had to stuff some people’s quick launch icons back into their accounts because they were lost when the user logged onto the computer before the servers were running. I really need to look into getting a better UPS – one that can talk to my servers (even the Linux box) and turn them off properly when the power goes out.

We’ve still got another week and a half before school is out, so anything can happen, stormwise. But I think we can (heh) weather it out.