Cool. Cold even. Front has arrived. Yesterday was hot, mid to high 80s with humid stagnant air. Nothing was moving and sweat was dripping off me as I worked on my decorations. Then the wind picked up, and the temps dropped. Mid 60s after dark, with gusting winds. Today should be cooler all day.
Yup, I finally got some decor set up. First I had to get a couple of pickups done. One pick up was some stuff to sell at my next non-prepping hobby swapmeet day, the next was for the BOL. The BOL’s was a couple of hundred feet of barbed wire. I’m not sure where I’ll use it, or if I’ll sell it to someone up there, but I’d rather have it than not. It’s used, but rolled neatly. I’ve been trying to buy some for a year but it goes for too much money. Finally got some.
Came home and started on decor in earnest. Felt a couple of drops of rain, but nothing real. Kept at it until dusk. Started lighting stuff, then the power went out. 3200 affected, mostly our neighborhood. Again. Freaking third world. One of the symptoms of a collapse is civic systems break down, and with increasing severity and frequency. We went years without a blink, and now we have lost power for more than an hour several times in the last few months. They are doing a ton of infrastructure, pulling high tension lines everywhere and building out and up… but we’ve never had issues like this before.
Since their estimate was for a 3 hour outage, I decided to fire up a generator. The whole house gennie is still not installed. My trusty generac was fueled and ready, so of course the pull cord broke. The Honda 3000 started on the second crank, once I’d connected the propane bottle. Didn’t use it, because I can’t feed the house with it– no 220v output. Power came back on shortly after that anyway. We used a Jetboil backpacking cook system to make some hot water for the Mountain House chili mac… we could have made just about anything in the house or pantry, but that stuff was sitting in the kitchen from my wife’s aborted GS camping trip and neither of us wanted to cook.
Wife fired up candles because she wanted to, and because her streamlight lantern is DOA due to leaking batteries. Mine is fine, and the big coleman LED lanterns worked well too. I got out a little oil lamp, and proceeded to fight with the wick. I don’t have any small wicks here… took them to the lake. I didn’t feel like trying a propane coleman, or one of the bigger kerosene lamps. I’ll be bringing a wick home as backup…
Not a bad little dry run, and I’m moving gennie maintenance up the list, along with trying to find an electrician for the whole house install. Maybe they’ll be a bit slower this time of year, and more willing to do the work without selling me anything.
Today I’ve got more pickups, and some more decor to do. If it isn’t raining. It’s showing 50% chance of light rain, with the cold snap continuing. We’ll see…
So it’s time to check your critical systems. Batteries in the smoke detectors, and in the gun safes. Fresh fuel in the stuff that uses fuel… Spares close at hand.
And stacks.
nick