More power, Igor!

Not having power seriously sucks rocks.  This picture is of a small park that I found last week when I played an ultimate frisbee game there.  Nice place, although very windy for ultimate.

The reason I'm posting it, though, is that, if you look, you'll see lots of lights on.  When I took it (Saturday morning), power was out for over half the people in Virginia.  So we see how big a deal it can be to have buried power lines (the buildings in the background are in Crystal City, which does have them).  (If you're curious to see the other pictures I took there, here's a few of them.)

As I said, over half the state was out at the time.  Unfortunately, that included our house.  In fact, by the time I was taking this, the battery for our FiOS connection was dead (so no home phone), as were most of the UPS's (except for the one I had shut off for most of the night).

This made driving around a bit of an adventure; most of the traffic lights were out.  Thankfully, we didn't see any accidents caused by that, but it was causing huge back-ups in a lot of places where you wouldn't expect them.

We ended up going to a Burger King for lunch.  The only interesting thing about that was that they were only able to accept cash.  Thankfully, we had some with us (not always the case).

After that lunch, we went to a friend's house to visit with him for a while (his power had been restored by then).  Ironically, after we'd been there for a bit, and were waiting for my wife to return from an errand she had run, his power went out again.  So we went home shortly after that, happily finding that power was on when we got there.

So we were lucky, in that we were out of service for less than twenty-four hours.  We had, pretty much from the beginning, been expected the outage to last multiple days (like the last time).  Many people are still waiting (including my dad), so we're definitely very thankful to be back online.

Update:  One side effect of the missing power was that my DVR forgot that it had been set to record today's Euro 2012 finaly between Italy and Spain.  Sadly, I didn't realize that, and didn't turn it on until the trophy ceremony was starting.  So I don't have any idea how the game went, but congrats to Italy for their win.