What’s on the iPod: Under the Bridge by Red Hot Chili Peppers
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| Valley Forge Mountain damage: photos by my husband |
Well, that was interesting.
Four days — 101 hours almost to the minute. That was the longest I’ve ever lived without power. I suspect the news got national coverage, but just in case you’re hearing it for the first time, there were plenty of lights out around here. The ice came down on trees already covered in heavy, wet snow. Down it all came. Everywhere.
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| Valley Forge Mountain yesterday |
Sunday morning at nine I was on the cell phone with the stepson when I heard the answering machine beep. I didn’t realize just how much I missed the electricity until I heard myself screaming with delight. See, it wasn’t so much the doing without power that bothered me. It was trying to keep this house warm with just a fireplace and six stove burners. It’s a big house. The average temperature in the kitchen was hovering close to 60 degrees. I can’t even tell you how cold it was sleeping here at night. We were fortunate to have really good sleeping bags (I broke a sweat more than once), but getting out in the morning was, uh, challenging.
Work was even more challenging. Naturally, I have two article deadlines this week. I had one phone interview on Wednesday morning — the day the power died. I tried to get in touch with the PR person. God bless Google Calendar — didn’t that appointment, complete with dial-in number, show up on my cell phone fifteen minutes prior to the call? I had synced the phone and hadn’t remembered.
I was able to locate more than one WiFi spot (pre-planning never hurts), so I would keep the fire going until 10 am, then dash off to the closest WiFif for three hours and get some work done. It’s amazing how much you can get done when you know your time is limited. All interviews and notes are completed. Now I just write. That’s the easy part.
Going with my belief that even the most frustrating situations can be learning experiences, here’s what I’ve learned from this little detour:
Cloud backup is a life saver. Because my Surface automatically saves to the Cloud, I’d gotten in the habit of doing the same thing on my desktop computer. Alleluia. Alleluia, Amen. That simple move allowed me to grab the Surface tablet, find a connection somewhere, and pick up where I left off. I didn’t miss a beat, nor did I have to rewrite a single thing from memory. Plus, all my emails are stored on my provider-based site. I had critical contact info when I needed it.
Always have at least three options. Because I’ve had minor outages in the past, I’ve had a list of possible temporary work sites for a while. Last week, I worked from: McDonald’s, Burger King, Starbucks, and my husband’s office. The first two were easy to get to. But Starbucks was challenging. The only one open nearby was on the other side of four closed roads (it hit hard here). I had to drive miles north to the main highway, then head south to the Starbucks. Should have stuck with McDonald’s, but I didn’t realize this until I was well into my attempt to get there. In for a penny, in for a pound, I say.
Expect complications. Road closures –no, I didn’t expect those. What I had expected, though, was enough ice to keep me housebound. I planned to use the cell phone as a hot spot if need be. However, even that came with complications — I had no cell service in the house for at least 24 hours. No 4G. Hell, no 1G, for that matter. When that happens, you need to…
Be a boy/girl scout: be prepared. I wasn’t. I’d gone to bed Tuesday night thinking ‘Maybe I should write down those numbers and copy some email addresses’ and yet I didn’t. Could have used them, especially when an assignment changed and I had to give my okay. My new practice going forward: save it all to a document, upload it to the cloud, and print it out.
Communicate any complications ahead of time. In one case, I was able to tell a contact “You know, we’re expecting an ice storm. Should I lose power and you not hear from me, here’s my cell phone number. Just send me a text.” Came in handy — I interviewed that person during the outage.
Were any of you affected by the ice storm?
Have you in the past lived through an interruption? How did you prepare? Was it enough? Did it change how you do things now?
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