13 June 2010 Listen to the thunder crying “ I am!”

13 June 2010 Listen to the thunder crying “ I am!”


Woke up to the sound of a thunderstorm rolling in at about 0530. The dog, no fan of loud noises, was pacing around the bedroom, looking for a place to avoid the noise. When the rain began, it dropped 0.71 inches of rain in just over an hour. Now the radar map is filled with pop-up thunderstorms along the ridge line and a line of more intense storms dropping in from the north west. We avoided the morning power outage that has begun to feel like a pattern over the last several weekends.

During yesterday’s power outage I tried to call the outage in, as I have always done, using my cell phone to access the no-humans-involved notification system. I keyed in my land line number to identify the account. Unlike previous calls, this one was rejected because my cell phone number is not keyed to the account.

We only have one phone jack in the house. It hides under a desk with a lot of other things obscuring it. To use a land line phone we have to find the land line set, move about a ton of stuff, crawl under furniture, and then look up the number in a phonebook. All of this in the dark, of course. We don’t use our cell phones as primary phones because service is spotty, at best, in our valley. If I hook up the land line so that it works, either the cordless phones or the fax will not work properly. So I need to find a solution that doesn’t entail me crawling under furniture in the dark trying to recall which splitter socket to plug a cable into for one phone call to a computer.

I also copied the account number from a bill and stuck it on the refrigerator for cell phone input. I plan on calling them after Wednesday.

We installed a new printer today on Gloria’s side of the system. Like all HP printers, it required multiple installs and screwed up other settings. We’ll be fighting gremlins for a month.



Steaks and sweet potato fries tonight if the storms hold off. Time to go light the grill. Charcoal and steaks – unbeatable!