Month: October 2024

The stillness and silence from earlier this morning in our Old Seminole Heights neighbourhood broke at around 8:30 when people started going out and about to assess the damage, walk their dogs, check in on their neighbors, and…fire up the generators.

Our plan is to eventually get a whole-house natural-gas powered generator, but for now, “Li’l Red,” whose primary purpose is to keep the fridge and freezer cold, is on active duty.

On a full tank of gas, Li’l Red can power the fridge/freezer, phones, and wifi for five hours, and it can also power our convection oven and lower-power backup microwave.

I always have 10 gallons (38 litres) of ethanol-free gasoline in canisters for emergencies, along with enough air conditioner-grade outdoor extension cords to run power to any part of the house from the generator outside.

This is Li’l Red’s first full-on use, and so far, she’s been performing admirably.

I was still tired after waking up at 5:45 and writing the previous post, so I went back to sleep for a couple more hours. I had a dream in which I woke up, checked my phone and saw it was 9:03 a.m., and went to survey the damage outside my house. Just as I stepped out the door…

…I woke up. I checked my phone for the time.

8:54 a.m. Close enough, I thought.

The only really worrying thing was the oak branch pictured below:

We have a one-car garage, where our nicer one lives. Our older one, a 2014 Nissan Rogue with less than 70,000 miles on it, lives outside.

Here’s a closer look:

Despite all appearances, the branch wasn’t making much contact with the car, and it didn’t even look scratched.

With the help of our neighbor Michael, who held the branch in place, I backed the car out, leaving this:

That looked a little precarious, but we had a stepladder handy to hold the bottom of the branch in place. That’ll have to do until we can get our hands on a saw or tree service to help:

As for the car: it looks good!

No picture with this post, because there’s no light.

After getting used to the sound of howling winds, pummeling rain, and the occasional “thunk” of debris hitting the roof, it was the utter silence that woke me up at 5:45 a.m.. With the power out, the constant hum of the air conditioning — a necessity in Florida — isn’t there. We’re on a residential street, but a block away from a major thoroughfare that leads straight downtown. Even on a normal day, there’s the occasional car or early morning dog walker — not today. No bird songs, either.

The air in the house is still cool. Hardly surprising; we ran the air conditioner a little colder and didn’t open any doors in anticipation that the power would go out. The sun hasn’t come up yet, and even if it had, it’d be hard to see through the hurricane fabric covering the windows.

It’s just darkness and silence. It’s rather nice.

I have to say: my home office octopus looks great when lit from below by flashlight!

Please pardon the title. I thought I’d experiment with a little Gen Z vernacular. No cap.

Pictured above is the outage map for TECO (Tampa Electric COmpany) as of 10:50 pm. EDT (UTC-4) on Wednesday, August 9. As you can see, we’re approaching 250,000 households without power, and we’re one of them. We still have internet because our router and wifi base station are connected to an uninterruptable power supply with a battery I replaced in the spring.

Here’s some footage from our house’s security cameras — one looking out from the front door, and one from the side: