Lights On

I am fully aware that it Irene's impact could have been much, much worse and that there were many in the Mid-Atlantic region and New England who did have a tougher time or more damage. Still, after 2.5 days w/o power or plumbing, this is a welcome sight.

It also means I can put my plans to adopt a nomadic lifestyle on hold for now.

Irene'd

Thankfully, it seems like overall, Hurricane Irene's impact was not as bad as predicted. Speaking only of our own property, there wasn't any flooding in the front yard and the water in the basement was much less than I expected. But, we've been without power at our home since 2am Sunday morning. Since we have a well, no electricity means no water.

We're at the point where we need to decide if we stick it out at home for a few more hours, or if we need to find somewhere else to stay for a night or two. I called Met Ed to see when the juice would be back on, and got this recorded message:

"The Met Ed Customer Service Center is closed due to outages from Hurricane Irene."

That's sure not the answer I was looking for, but unfortunately, I guess it is an answer. Looking for more information, I went to Met Ed's website and was surprised to find an informative outage map.

If you look at York County, we have 2,000-5,000 outages, which I was surprised to see was more than counties closer to Philly. However, I think it's because other utility companies service those areas. Compared to Berks County (Reading area) and it's 12,000 outages, York County got off relatively lightly with just under 5,000.

A quick drive around Manchester last night made it appear as if it were just our street that was without power, but there's 144 customers without power in Manchester.


This, along with Met Ed's own outage, makes me think the lights won't be back on for quite awhile.

If you're reading this from somewhere within Irene's Path of Devastation, or in our case, it's Trail of Inconvenience, I hope you fared well and/or wish you the best of luck with any repairs.

Update: Moments after posting this, I got a call on my cel from Met Ed's automated system to verify whether power had been restored. (Hit "1" for yes, "2" for no.) I felt like this was a huge cause for optimism, but since I'm not at home, I called my wife, only to find that the power is still out.

Saturday Long Run: Return to Humiditytown

It was really, really humid this morning. The kind of humid that makes me think it's time to find another hobby. The kind of humid that makes me question the existence of good in this world. The kind of humid that makes me right write posts complaining about humid it is. The kind of humid that makes me screw up homophones.

Hal Higdon called for 9 this week. Since I've done such a great job of listening to him so far, even this week, my first full week "on program", I just ran my usual 10-mile route through Manchester and Mt. Wolf. I had a slow pace again today, but unlike Monday's unexplainable bonk, I'm just going to attribute this one to slogging through 100% humidity.

(Yours truly at my finishing point, Humiditytown Middle School)

Did I mention that it was really, really humid? It was 73 degrees at the start of my run, which is quite warmer than it's been for my morning runs the past two weeks but nothing special overall for the summer, but the humidity must have been AT LEAST 1000% if not infinitely more. It was very overcast, which allows me to forgo the visor, but I was still disgusting and sweaty within half a mile.

Since words are powerless to convey exactly how much I was sweating, let's again use the power of MS Paint to try to capture the level of disgustingness (That's not a word, spell check? Screw you!) we're talking about here (click to enlarge):


Good luck on your runs, everyone. I'll be inside playing video games. (And best wishes to anyone in Irene's path.)