The storm in retrospect

So, the weather here was pretty awful this weekend -- I got rained during the Sowing Seeds charity bike ride on Saturday, then nearly drowned in a flooding basement (OK, that's a slight exaggeration), and there was no racing to speak of -- but it was much, much worse in points North.

The fact that we had a little rain, and some strong winds didn't amount to as much of an inconvenience as some thought it would. We didn't have power overnight on Saturday, and I was actually looking forward to breaking out my Whisperlite for some camp-style cooking on Sunday evening (I've got an electric stove), when the electricity came back on in the afternoon. I suppose I'll have to actually go camping to get a chance to use my camping equipment.

I couple of things caught my attention during the weekend. The first was that my cell phone continued to work all weekend, so I didn't miss a social media beat. I was also able to stay in touch with friends in other places, to let them know that we were doing fine, even without electricity.

It got me wondering, though, what would have happened if our phones had all died. Would my parents have worried? Would I have been able to check in with them? It also made me think that I might start designating some time to turn my phone off for a bit, if only to give myself the illusion being less dependent on my phone.

The other thing was an email I got today from our electric utility, PPL, which, I thought, did a pretty good job of getting our power restored quickly, did send me an email to talk about their efforts to restore the grid. OK, yes I do have a smartphone, and yes, I just mentioned that my phone continued to function throughout the blackout. But, I couldn't help but find it ironic that an email was the preferred method of contact. Had my power been out, and had I not had a functioning smartphone, I would never have received that email, or been able to check PPL's website for information, etc.

Of course, I don't have a good alternative to suggest to PPL. There was a time when landlines were everyone's preferred method of reliable communication, but now, many of us don't have land lines, or, if we do, we have cordless phones that don't work without power. So, that's interesting.

The other thing I was thinking about this weekend was that I did not fall victim to the apparently common urge to rush out and spend money on things like batteries and bottled water. I wouldn't say I regretted it -- I had a few flashlights around, and together there was enough juice in them to get through the brief outage. But I did wish I'd bought ice. Predictably, our local gas stations were out by early Sunday afternoon, at which point we thought the outage was going to continue until Tuesday. Had the electrical predictions not been wrong, I would have had to throw away a lot of food, and that would have been sad. Or I would have had to eat a lot of previously-frozen meet on Sunday night.

So, I was glad not to have been caught up in the hysteria, but maybe next time I'll take the warnings slightly more seriously. I'll also, though, stay focused on thinking of the folks who had it worse.