31 and Out

I thought we'd been spared.  Hurricane Joaquin was at one point supposed to hit or brush New Jersey, but as of late yesterday, the storm was projected to move out to sea after having hit the Bahamas and bear no threat to the mainland, and I thought we were free from having to worry about a blackout.

I had to think again.

Last night, we got rain and wind not directly associated with but still influenced by the hurricane.  As I was working on this blog last night, the electricity suddenly went out, the cause having turned out to be a tree down the street that came down on the wires.  The electricity stayed out for nearly ten hours.  Not only did I risk having the PC blow out, I couldn't get to see a movie on a DVD that I took out of my library on a non-renewable loan.  The nuisance rainstorm, in fact, turned out to be a powerful nor'easter, the sort you normally expect in March.  A local meteorologist on a New Jersey cable TV station said that trees could fall after a good,  soaking rain after months of dry weather compromised so many root systems.  That's what must have happened.  

This is our thirty-first outage, including a Labor Day brownout this year, since the start of November 2009; needless to say, my patience is wearing thin.  This was a long outage, it ran overnight, and I was unable to get much sleep despite literally being in the dark because I was too apprehensive.  This outage actually happened a year to the day after our last outage of a duration of longer than a few minutes (we had two minute-long outages this past year, one in May and the other in August).  Four of the longer outages we've had have been in October; given the all the bad October weather of recent years (Snowtober, Sandy, this most recent nor'easter), the month is replacing February as my least favorite month.

At about five outages a year (on average), we haven't had a single twelve-month period - calendar year or otherwise - without a blackout.  I'm sick and tired of all these outages, and it looks like I have to look forward to an endless future of being sick and tired.