My house didn't blow away, at least
Storms and blackouts are fun, for about five minutes or so.
The remnants of Hurricane Fiona dropped by this weekend, and she was in full eighties-hair-metal-band-trashing-a-hotel-room mood.
My own property didn’t suffer any damage beyond a downed tree branch, but I also was without electricity for a few days, and it followed the standard blackout time line: kind of fun for the first night, when you light candles and play board games, and then you wake up the next morning and realize you need coffee right now but the coffee maker won’t work without electricity and it’s still raining so you can’t even make instant coffee on the Coleman stove so yes I am in fact going to the only Circle K close by with electricity and lining up as long as it takes to get a large gas-station coffee because you do not want to see me without caffeine in my system and no I don’t know when the power is coming back and I told you should have downloaded some shows onto the Netflix app and maybe you could read a book instead of sitting there whining about how there’s nothing to do and fine I’ll check the Nova Scotia Power outage map to see when this will end and Tuesday Night at 11PM?!? there’s no way that can be right but I can barely read this stupid map anyway because the cell phone service is completely overloaded and oh God I just made a Costco run last week so my fridge is packed with a hundred dollars of perishable food that’s probably going to go bad but I have no way of cooking it at least until the rain stops so all I have is this box of Pop Tarts at the moment and no we can’t go to McDonald’s because they’re all closed except for the one in the business park that has fifty cars backed up in the drive thru and oh God how did people live before electricity was invented and they had to keep ten kids, not counting the two who died in childbirth, occupied all the time?!?
[deep breaths…deeeeeep breaths]
Anyway, I have electricity again and the sedatives are starting to wear off, so it’s all good. But I have a lot of catching up on work to do, so posting might be light this week.
Halifax saw many downed trees and some property damage but didn’t come out of Fiona too badly. Other areas weren't so lucky. Port aux Basques, on the southwest tip of Newfoundland, appears to have been hit hardest:
Absolutely devastating, and at least one person in the area was killed.
But we Newfoundlanders didn’t settle on a barren rock in the north Atlantic ocean (and the Port aux Basques area is barren even by Newfoundland standards) without being tough and being ready to help our neighbours when they need it the most.
Ditto the sentiments below. One question...are power outages frequent in your area other than in major storm events like this? You won't like the price of an adequate back-up generator to power your entire home if you purchase one. Until your alternative is to spend a week+ with no electricity at all. Had that experience more than once. Bought a small portable generator years ago, and eventually went to a whole-home standby. Not cheap, but worth every penny. Especially in the winter, when ice storms can be a problem where I live. Last big one a few years ago knocked the power out in my neck of the woods for 8 days of far below freezing temps over the Christmas holiday season. Best present I got that year was the sound of the generator cranking over and starting up.
So glad that you are ok.