nopin

Monday, October 3, 2011

Minor News headlines

Top o' the news this mornin':

The blessing of the pets took place last weekend, and I plumb forgot that it took place the weekend before St. Francis' Feast Day, and not on the day itself. :( Cute article, though, what?

Apparently, I was not alone in my power outage this morning. Far from it. "The problem affected virtually the entire GVEA coverage area from Delta to Cantwell. Only a small core area in downtown Fairbanks maintained power during the outage." I've always taken pride in knowing I'd be just fine in a power outage. I can cook proper meals on the wood stove, and I have plenty of battery-powered light sources. But it's still quite annoying, and it takes a longer time to boil a tea kettle of water on the wood stove than on the cook stove.

2 comments:

Rena said...

Does your power go out often? I suppose in weather like yours it's no big deal for the fridge, but it's still a pain to lose power. What about the oil furnace - does it need electricity to ignite or does it have a pilot light?
And in the dead of winter do you worry about the block heater for your car if there's no electricity? Can cars be permanently damaged if they're left out in the super cold without being plugged in?

Arvay said...

It flickers maybe 3-4 times a year, and when there is a big storm, we lose power for a few hours as you can generally count on a tree or limb coming down. The oil stove is self-igniting somehow, and it does require power.

As for the car, no, I generally plug it in for 1 hour every 10F degrees below 0, so at -40 it'd only have been plugged in for half the night anyway. The car is okay to freeze up when you're not going to use it any time soon. But yeah, I'd be stuck at home if we ever lost power at -40, but if it's -40 and my oil stove wouldn't work, I'd want to stay home and keep a fire going anyway just to keep my house from freezing up!