Nasty weather!

Yesterday was another one of those great meteorological days. It poured - "cats and dogs" poured ..... Biblical "Noah's Ark" poured! It started raining early in the morning and didn't finish until sometime after Midnight. And the wind was awful.

I had to take my son Joey to a birthday party yesterday afternoon at an indoor roller skating rink in a neighboring town. As we ran in from the parking lot, my BlackBerry, which hangs on my belt got so wet, that I had to take it apart (i.e remove the battery and the back cover) to let it dry out in order to get it to function. Also, on the way back to the car, as we were leaving, the wind blew so hard that we were literally pushed along by it's ferocity. In the process I lost my beloved 2009 ARRL Field Day cap. The last I saw, it had taken off from my head like a kite and was blowing somewhere towards the direction of Staten Island.

There were tree limbs down all over and somewhere in the neighborhood, one came down and took a power line with it. We had no electricity from about 7:15 PM last night until about 5:00 AM this morning. Of course, without electricity, the furnace won't ignite; so we also had no heat. When the lights came on at 5:00 AM, I got up to turn everything off around the house. I took notice of the thermostat and saw that the temperature in the house had fallen to 58F (14C).

I heard somewhere that we got over 3 inches (7.5 cm) of rain last night. The good thing is that it was warm enough that it wasn't snow - that would have been over 30 inches (75 cm) worth, had it been the white stuff.

The other good thing is that my antennas are still up. No tree limbs brought down the G5RV and the wind wasn't strong enough to knock over the HF9V. After the power went out, I considered putting the K2 on battery and operating without the usual local electronic RF pollution. However, my wife was working and my daughter was at a classmate's house for a sleepover; so it was just me and Joey in the house. It would not have been a good thing to leave him alone in the dark while I selfishly played radio in the basement. We made it through our little "power failure adventure" together.

72 de Larry W2LJ