The power I started worrying about while taking a shower at 2 am last night and realized I had left my smartphone with a little flashlight built into it in the bedroom. I realized I could feel the walls and get to it if I had to when the power went out which it was predicted to likely by the weather lady on KSBW TV. So I relaxed a little knowing I could navigate in the pitch dark if I needed to by get to my phone. After my shower I couldn't sleep because intuitively I sensed the power was really likely to go off and I wanted to take care of it possibly by starting our generator to preserve the food in our refrigerator better.
So, I went into the living room and turned the TV on and sort of waited for the power outage that I sensed was coming.
However, it was strange because 3 times the power went off and so everything went dark including my
Flatscreen TV in the living room and three times it all eventually came back on again. I realized that this kind of power outage was likely from the lightning strikes and not necessarily from the high winds or rain.
Then a 4th time it went out but this time stayed out. I thought about starting the generator but realized that because of the really high gusting winds it might cause the generator to shut down and that would be another problem to deal with because once that carbon monoxide detector goes off you cannot restart your generator for at least 15 minutes or more back up again.
So, I decided to wait until morning because it was almost 4 am at this point and go to sleep. I told my wife the power was off. Then at 5:30 or 6 am it came back on again and woke my wife up so now she was awake from all the lights in the other room being on because she is light sensitive. But, once I'm asleep nothing usually wakes me up at all. I just sometimes have trouble going to sleep but no trouble with staying asleep once I'm asleep.
So, I woke up and the house was warm again because the Central heating came on automatically and the refrigerator started automatically too so this allowed me to catch up on my sleep. One of our house cleaners brought by two boxes of wood for the fireplace in case the power went off a longer time and I already had about 1 box of wood so now I have about 3 days worth of wood to stay warm. If power goes out after about 3 days we usually get a hotel because I'm 77 and my wife is 70 so we can stay well. One year the power was off for a week and it got down to 58 degrees in our house so we got a hotel but we didn't feel well by then. So, now our rule is 3 days without power and we get a hotel usually now. However, it's important to realize it pretty much never goes below freezing where we live here on the California coast. Many places after 3 days without power you are going to be popcicles like you are frozen so getting to some place warm might be a matter of life or death. That is much less true here on the California coast.
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