Yesterday Avi, Genevieve, Kristen, Leo, Nori, and Zephyr came over for Winter Feast. Click here for the pictures.

I used to post pictures here on MSN Spaces but I can't figure out how to post photos without them getting all weird and pixilated. Flickr, sadly, does much better.

During the windstorm a couple weeks ago my neighbor’s tree snapped about two-thirds of the way up and broke the power lines. When the power went out I thought it was just temporary. After all, I live in the city and we never have long power outages. Never…

I get up the next morning and it is 58 degrees in the house. Hmmm… Clearly the power isn’t back up. It’s a Friday morning, my last day of work before taking the rest of the year off. I shower (there’s still hot water in the hot water heater) and get ready to head to work. Cathy, one of the women on my team, calls to say that she’s been to Microsoft and there is no power. Work is canceled. Okay, that’s fine with me. Avi, Genevieve, and I decide to meet at Le Pichet for lunch. As I’m leaving I see the fallen tree:

And here is the downed power line:

I point out the fallen tree and downed lines to Dave, a neighbor. He agrees to call the power company and tell them not to turn on the power without correcting the downed lines. After all, it could start a fire. There are downed power lines everywhere in the Seattle area; there’s little chance we’ll have power anytime soon.

I pack everything up to go and sleep on my boat. The boat is great because it’s designed to be unplugged. When I come back on Sunday afternoon I see this:

Turns out the power company turned on the power three hours after Dave spoke with them and they agreed not to turn on the power. Apparently the flames from the downed power line were five feet high. In some spots the electricity burned through the concrete leaving dime sized holes:

The noise was so loud you could hear it a block away. There were three explosions. The first was when the power came on. Apparently the second was when one of the dancing wires hit the telephone box, blowing out the phones for my whole block. The third was the transformer down the street blowing. The fire department is just a few blocks away and they were on the scene almost immediately. They cordoned off the block and a police officer sat outside for several hours waiting for the power company to show up.

So, we have no power and now the phones are out.

The power company got the power back on Sunday afternoon and by Saturday we had phone service again. I use DSL and so without phone service I’m also without Internet access. I was totally surprised by how dependent I’ve become on the Internet, email, and IM. Totally sucked. It’s been a rough week but I’m beginning to remember what we did before the Internet...