And we're up

We hope. Murkworks.net is answering hails again, and I just restarted the MurkMUSH. solarbird reports our mail server is being cranky--it really didn't like that unexpected shutdown earlier this afternoon--but hopefully we're staggering back online now.

Better mail me at my gmail account if you need me, at least until newmoon is live again!

ETA 9:27pm: Newmoon turns out to be okay after all, so our mail is flowing once more. We now return you to your regularly scheduled Internet, already in progress!

Electricity, it's good to have you back!

So, our long national couple-of-day Puget Sound nightmare of darkness and Ragnarok and fally-downy trees looks like it may actually be over. Our power came back for a brief flirty tease around 3:30 this afternoon--hanging around for about half an hour, just long enough for solarbird to try to bring our servers back up, only to then lose them again as the power went HA HA NO POWER FOR YOU and died again. But it came back around 6:15, and as of this writing it appears to be finally stable again. To wit, yay! I mean, not to be all petty-first-world-problem-y and such, but electricity? I like it. I like having light and Internet and ability to dry my clothes and be warm. So big kudos to all our local power crews who have been busting their asses all weekend to get light restored to the region.

Last night was a bit scary coming home from work, what with their being no streetlights or stoplights along Bothell Way past the Lake Forest Park shops. This meant of course that all the drivers had to revert to treating intersections as four-way stops, and that's all well and good, except when you're at an intersection like Bothell Way and 61st--which is a pain in the ass to cross on foot even when the lights are actually working. In the dark, kinda scary, really! Those of us getting off the busses dropping us off had to try to arrange to cross in herds, on the assumption that if there were a lot of us, we'd be easier to spot. Also, kudos to spazzkat for his wisdom in advising bringing a flashlight to work, 'cause going up the hill to our house in darkness was kinda scary as well. And kinda cool, being able to shine my flashlight for a few dozen feet ahead of me. Seeing way more stars than usual overhead was also neat.

The power was off for us all through last night, which made figuring out what to do in the dark a bit of a challenge. I wound up transcribing all the transactions out of my checkbook register into a new one, since the old one had gotten soaked through on my way home on Thursday and I wanted one that wasn't all crinkly. What an exciting thing to do in the dark, huh?

Sleeping was also a bit of a challenge, since the house was all dark and cold and I still don't like sleeping without the air filter--yay, sinus headaches all morning! And it didn't help, either, having one of those dreams where you dream you're getting up in the morning only you're not really--and this time it involved OH THANK GOD WE HAVE POWER only not really. Sulk. So this morning I got to spend (drumroll) paying bills, since power outage or no power outage, that didn't stop the phone bill from being due.

Then we headed down to Lake Forest Park for lunch. Unsurprisingly, the place was packed. Packed enough, in fact, that you could feel the floor in the Third Place Commons vibrating from the tread of so many feet--which was a little scary. But there was plenty of heat and light and the food court was doing incredible business, so we all had tasty, tasty BBQ sandwiches. And we got a few necessary staples, cat food and coffee and such, and Dara plugged in her (now old) laptop to get it powered up just enough so she could cleanly shut it down. We didn't get to use the free wi-fi at the Commons, though, since it was down--they get their wi-fi via the Library downstairs, and the Library gets it from Bothell, which had no power at the time. Oh well.

Coming back home, we went up the Goat Trail to see the tree that had fallen over. Which turned out to be two trees, still well and thoroughly blocking the road. There was still enough space for us to climb through, and since there weren't any power lines at all near where we wanted to climb, we decided to go ahead and go for it. Dara took a lot of pictures, while Paul and I chatted a bit with a lady who lived on that street. She told us that she'd heard an explosion around 7pm on Thursday night--which must have been when the trees went down. I was a little alarmed to realize that yeah, one of those trees must have been the one I saw precariously tilting over on my way home that night, and I am beyond grateful that I got home before it fell over.

One of the houses near ours had a big ol' branch down in its driveway, and we saw lots of other storm debris all over the place. We have branches on our roof, and as I came up the hill from our little excursion, it really kind of struck me how much we lucked out during the storm. There are a couple of specific trees further up the hill from our house that, had they gone over, would have plowed right into us. Dara says that our being so far up the hill was actually advantageous--the winds lose a little power coming up to us from the lake. Which fits in with how that house farther down the hill, the one that actually did get smashed by a falling tree, is right on the Corridor of Doom with a straight gusty shot right off Lake Washington.

As we got home we saw, on a distant hill, a power crew working. Which was hope-inspiring--and around 3:30 we got that brief tease of power. It went down again and we were all "AIGH", up to the point where we were just about ready to alleviate our boredom by playing Yahtzee. I figure that the Power Gods must have gone "Well, hell, they're about to play Yahtzee, let's have mercy on 'em for fuck's sake", and *zap*, the power came back. ;)

Now we're getting back to normal, and we're all playing with our computers, and Dara in particular is about to play with the new (refurbished) laptop I got her since her old one is increasingly erratic. And I finally got to put away my laundry. Maybe I'll even get to write tonight.