Back on the Air

We started out the week, this week, by having a macroburst which took out the power for over two days. Ick. And we were very lucky in the storm. Many trees were broken off well above the ground. One of them dropped 100' or so of trunk across our yard, but it only hit one of our (much smaller) trees. When I first started cleaning, I was thinking that the whole thing was a disaster, but I quickly put my over-the-top rhetoric on hold when I thought about the people who've had their homes completely destroyed in storms. As I said, we were very lucky; and very thankful for that luck. Now if we'd only had a generator to take care of the two days without power.

We were lucky there, too, though, insofar as that my dad had dropped a small freezer off with us with some food a few months ago when my son was born. So we were able to take that over to a friend's house to preserve the irreplaceable perishables (I mentioned having an infant son, right?) by plugging it in. Hooray.

We had some friends over for the Fourth (already planned), which actually went well, despite the lack of power.

We've mostly just been catching up since then. It did give me an excuse to check a couple of things that have been wrong for a while on my home server, so I'm happy to have that resolved. I also got the computer equipment in my utility room moved over to the rack I bought for it a while ago (yes, extreme overkill, but it was destroying the shelves I was previously keeping it on).

And I finally got a new cell phone today. I'd had my Treo for many years (the 700p was new when I bought it), and had waited a long time for AT&T's exclusivity with the iPhone to expire. But after Verizon got it, I still kept kvetching, waiting for... well, I'm not really sure what. The prospect of Verizon setting download caps on their data plans was finally enough to get me to switch over, though (helped by my wife being happy about the idea of replacing her Palm Centro; a happy surprise, that), so I broke down on Wednesday and got one for each of us. They arrived today, and life is good. And now, perhaps, we'll have an internet connection even if our power goes down for a couple of days. Happy days.