Storm and Outage

There was a lot of storm activity here Friday afternoon.  I used iLightning to catch this pic of a lightning strike in the nearby foothills. 

Oops, and there went our power… and it came back on 90 minutes later, for 5 seconds… then went off again… here we are sitting on the couch playing word games to candlelight, and that was kind of fun…

The power came on and went back off twice more during the night. This morning, I was dealing with an angry beeping carbon monoxide detector in the basement, even after the power had been on for awhile. I replaced the battery and it was still beeping every 30 seconds. Turns out that several basement circuits were dead. I discovered, after tromping outside in the cold rain, and manhandling the dumb breaker panel doors, that multiple GFCI breakers in the newer power panel had tripped, probably when the power surged during one of the outages, or maybe when lightning struck nearby. Fixed! Then later this morning, we realized the house WiFi wasn’t working, as its backup battery had run down overnight. I hit the power button on the UPS, and we had internet! For about 5 minutes… then the UPS started beeping every few seconds, and shut down again. After downloading the user manual, I realized it was beeping because the outlet it was plugged into was dead. That lead me to yet another GFCI that had tripped, on the wall in another room, hiding behind my skis. After resetting that, everything seems pretty normal here… other than all that snow coming down out there.

We’re having fun watching the birds frequenting our feeders over the deck. I was going to say “Birds love snow,” since we tend to see more of them when it’s snowing, but of course the real takeaway is “Birds love to eat,” especially on snowy days…