OT: Power back...finally

I should've known better than to taunt Mother Nature. After we got our power back from Isabel (after 30 hours), I changed my MSN IM handle to include “(power's back...take THAT, Isabel!)”. Apparently, Mother Nature takes these things rather personally, because our power went out again Monday morning at around 5am. Unfortunately, this time around, it was us and about 5 or 6 other neighbors who were out, while the rest of the neighborhood had power.

For those who haven't lived through this, the reason this is bad is because the power companies, in general, work on outages based on the number of people affected. That is, the priority of a given problem is based on the number of households that will be restored by repairing the problem. So if your entire neigborhood or county is out, you get a higher priority than if a few homes (or a single home) is out. This makes a great deal of sense to me, but is small comfort when you have no power, and you know you're at the bottom of a list that's tens of thousands of housholds long. Dominion Virginia Power has a useful diagram that shows the order of repairs. Our repair was a #5, which is why it only got fixed this evening.

If you work for the utilities, or if you've got family away from home working on the outages from Isabel, you have my gratitude, and that of many of my neighbors. Being without power was a pain, but I'd rather be without power than without my family, so I greatly appreciate the sacrifices many utility workers have been making to get the power restored. The guys who fixed our problem were from North Carolina (I'm near Washington, DC), and they looked very tired. But they did a great job, and I hope they get to go home to their families soon!