CORSA 2012: NECC: Power Restored

[Vairtec Corporation]

Tuesday afternoon -- power back on!  Hooray!  A mere 2-1/2-day outage.

I used my patented "inverse Murphy's Law" to bring the power back:  I 
drove 40 minutes to a family member's home to take a shower, then spent 
$77 at Lowe's for cables to bring generator power into the house.  When 
I got back, the power was on!

Note:  A Corvair friend lent me a large generator.  People who can't be 
bothered joining a local Corvair club have NO IDEA what they are missing.

With the sump pump running we got the six inches of water out of the 
basement.  The ground is so saturated that pumping out the water created 
standing water on the lawn!

By never, and I mean NEVER opening the fridge or freezer the whole time 
we lost very little.  The frozen foods remained frozen and the fridge 
remained cool if not cold.  We pitched stuff that is sensitive to 
temperature (like chicken) and anything we thought was questionable, but 
even the milk was still good.

Because we spent Friday evening taking things off the lower shelves in 
the basement we lost virtually nothing down there despite the half a 
foot of water.  One box, too heavy to pick up, got flooded... it 
contained NOS Corvair exhaust manifolds... They're still NOS, just a 
little more emphasis on the 'O' now...

The downed tree (which missed the house by about three feet) is being 
cut up as I type.  I then get to split it into firewood.  Of course, we 
took a similar-sized tree down about three weeks before the storm, and I 
still haven't finishing splitting that one!  My new side business, 
selling firewood, will be opening soon.

My computer is back up and running and so I can get caught up on the 
business e-mails that came to the address that my smartphone refuses to 
recognize.

Now back to our regular programming...

--Bob Marlow