house of warwick

Zarah writes of her sixth day without power: “Luckily we’ve got a warm place to stay, but I’m worried about the pipes freezing, and it’s really inconvenient not to be in your own house, and now they’re saying on the news that thieves are breaking into the darkened homes, so I’m worried about that too.”

I can sympathize. We’re on day seven with no real end in site and snow is definitely on the way. As far as looters, two police cars caught someone in our neighborhood last night–doing who knows what–and it required two police cars to get them “moving along”.

As far as patience, I’m out of it. I’m not angry with the utilities or the work crews, but I need to go back to my routine out of concern for my sanity. One of our cats cried all night, keeping Tammy and I from getting more than an hour of sleep at a time. Now I know how new parents must feel…

Tammy went down to check on the cats and found that the heater had tripped power strip’s breaker. In two hours, the temp had dropped 5 degrees, making the idea that they were safe less palatable. In one of the most stressful situations, Tammy and I rescued the cats, forcing them in to any bag we could find, then driving them to our temporary shelter.

Imagine that in the middle of the night, woke you up, placed a bag over your head, put you in a mysterious noise-making room and then hauled you to another new place. Stressful, eh?

As a modern human, one tends to forget just how much we rely on electricity. Right now, my house temperature is 41ËšF and there’s little hope that we’ll see power restored before Friday this week. I’m typing this post and uploading via my Sprint Treo 650 acting as a Bluetooth modem, another reminder of what life was like before DSL.

Man, it’s too easy to forget the past and take the benefits of today for granted. Never having been this kind of mass disaster victim, I couldn’t identify with them. This week, I’ve learned that lesson and it’s one that I won’t soon forget.

I’m going to figure out a way to go solar with some of my heating and power needs so this won’t happen to me in the future. Heating a home to 60ËšF with solar would be easier than living on the prayer that my free electricity at my friends house doesn’t give out.

See, that’s the worst of it. I’m safe now, but it could change at any moment. A sickening feeling, for sure. The low temp tonight is 9ËšF and we won’t see temps above freezing until Friday. I’m praying for the electric company work crews.

We’ve been hit by a major ice storm in Springfield. It arrived late Friday afternoon the 12th of January and over the last two days, laid around an inch of ice on trees and power lines. Streets have been saved for the most part because the water would run off and in to the main sewer drains before freezing. I can’t say as much for the trees and power lines.

65,000 utility customers in the city are estimated to be without power. In a small city with a population of 150,000 people, that means that 90% of the city is likely without power. In a bizarre twist of fate, my neighbor on the north side of my house has power and I do not. Worse, the house is empty, recently having a change in ownership.

To our benefit, a recent friendship is paying some dividends. Paul Boulifard, an architecht and neighbor, sold his house this month and moved to North Carolina. He doesn’t close until the end of the month which means that his vacant house (with power!) is available as a shelter. Tammy and I stayed here last night and are making plans to stay here until either the power goes out here or ours returns.

The worst part? Well, there’s two: we don’t have working plumbing in our house right now and there’s no end in site to the power outage.

Tammy and I picked this weekend to redo the bathroom floor before knowing about the impending ice storm. We made the decision based on the aforementioned empty house and the easy access to working plumbing while ours would be out of commission. Thursday, we removed baseboard trim pieces and the closet door frame you can see in Tammy’s photos. We had the floor removed down to the joists when it hit Friday afternoon while I was at Lowe’s getting all of the supplies. We ran extension cords to the neighbor’s house with power so we could work yesterday, allowing us to complete the subfloor installation and most of the backerboard for the tile. Kevin French was doing most of the work while I was acting as the assistant–a partnership I’ll never forget–working until it was too dark to see to saw boards. I’ve got pictures, but it might be awhile before they make it up to the web.

Now we’ve hit another roadblock: tile adhesive and grout can’t be applied at temperatures below 60˚F and the inside temperature of the house is 48˚F as of this writing. With no hope that power will be restored today, tomorrow or maybe even this week, our tile project is on hold.

This kind of storm is depressing. It immobilizes you–no power, no refrigeration, bitter cold–and makes you realize how fragile your life is without electricity. In my neighborhood, there are trees 50+ years old and over 50 feet tall, covered with ice and cracking under the strain. The tension is palpable where you’re wondering if your tree, your house is next. The sounds are especially demoralizing. Imagine: utter silence in your neighborhood shattered by a sharp crack of a branch breaking under the ice load. That branch falls through the others on the tree, cracking and shattering ice and branches on the way down.

The whole experience is comparable to what my imagination thinks a sniper attack would be like. First, everyone’s lives are upended by the first “crack” and then we all try to return to some type of normal while we cope with the event. Then, as more and more occur, we all become paranoid, silently praying the sound marks someone else’s misfortune and not ours. It’s a guilty feeling.

We’ve lost half of our small tree in the front yard and a large branch of the maple in our back yard. I expect that our south neighbor’s large tree will crush our garage (and our Honda Accord) soon if the ice persists. The National Weather Service says we’ll be getting another half inch of ice. More depression.

At Paul’s house, where I’m typing this, it’s warm. We have electricity here, working plumbing and a sense of normalcy. There’s no furniture, so it’s like we’ve stumbled across the hunting lodge on a mountain after the avalanche–we’re safe now, but what’s next.

This headline from TechWeb News is so insane that I won’t read the article out of spite. Why on earth would a consumer product like a cell phone/iPod hybrid make a lick of difference to an IT department at a company?

Are there no editors with integrity left?

Matt jumps on the bandwagon:

Matt Mower: “Please - universe- let all the sterile ranting about ‘will the iPhone this’ or ‘the iPhone doesn’t that stop.’ It’s more boring than all the ‘will there be an iPhone’ chatter before MacWorld.”

Unless you’ve had real “hands-on” time with the iPhone, save your comments about it. Don’t say anything about it’s data performance, battery life, WiFi or hard drive size. You haven’t used it, it’s not a shipping product and the software isn’t even finished. How can you make an informed opinion? Don’t leave comments on websites that say “it doesn’t even do ‘X’ so it sucks”.

Seriously.

Get a clue.