It’s certainly been an eventful past couple of days with Hurricane Ian slamming into southwest Florida and then wreaking havoc all the way through Central Florida and out over the Atlantic Ocean before sweeping back in to Myrtle Beach and then passing just west of us.
It is an old joke in Florida that no one takes hurricanes and tropical storms until Jim Cantore of the Weather Channel turned up in your city. That was your clue that your town was hopelessly screwed and about to be ground zero for landfall!
The images from Florida have been heartbreaking to put it mildly and hopefully the loved ones we’re still waiting to hear from are OK. I imagine that cleanup is going to take months if not years from just the effects of the storm surge and flooding alone.
Fortunately, whilst it was properly mildly moist round here with winds topping out round 45-50 knots late in the afternoon and into the evening, we only lost power twice (one was only 30s and the second one from 2000-2330) and that was the extent of the inconvenience.
All things considered, that’s nothing compared to the shocking effects south of here!
OK, the timing of the second power cut was a bit annoying as Nicholas and I were about to enjoy “On Patrol: Live”…the successor to the show “Live PD” which embeds camera crews with police officers all over the country. The irony was that I had just remarked to Nick that the hosts of the show were likely to have to do a heck of a lot of dancing on air as four of the eight departments they’re currently following were either already affected by Ian (Marion and Volusia County in Florida) or were in the process of being impacted (Berkeley and Richland County in South Carolina).
Fortunately, we were able to enjoy most of the show until the UPS servicing the router finally gave out after three and a half hours (and having shut down everything that was attached to it!). We had brought the UPS attached to Nick’s computer downstairs to restore power to the Google Fibre jack (so hopefully in the future with power interruptions, we won’t lose the network connection) and we’ll be putting another UPS I had laying about round here on his computer.
The other key piece was a new subscription to DirecTV Stream that is replacing the DirecTV satellite service for about $50 less per month. I was already of the mind to do this switch when Google Fibre was installed but the looming wall of rain coming our way moved those plans up a bit as the only downside to DirecTV (other than the ever expanding cost like with cable!) is that intense rain usually leads to loss of signal with the dreaded Error 771 message.
So here we are in the dark streaming the Reelz channel on DirecTV stream app on the iPad with the router powered by one UPS and the Google Fibre jack powered by another. It seems Rube Goldberg-esque…but it worked!
Now that Ian is well and truly past us, it’s time to power up the Nerdery and get back to business! 🙂