Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Power Outage

Being prepared for a serious disaster also means you're prepared for trivial inconveniences.  Earlier this week we has some storms roll through that knocked out the power.  Since I'm crazy that way, I've got a half dozen flashlights I can find in the dark, including the one I always have in my pocket.  I fired up our old Coleman lantern and we had plenty of light for reading and doing dishes.

Since we were the only house with an obvious light a neighbor who I haven't met came by and asked if we had a flashlight she could borrow.  She said her kids were not very pleased with being in the dark.  I lend her a good flashlight and a (rather crappy) crank-up LED lantern.  I figured that way her kids could be part of the solution, cranking that lantern to keep the light going.  Seriously, it lasts like 3 minutes before you have to crank it up again.  But as far as something to lend out it's totally worth keeping around. 

I also recently put together a solar recharging station, so I pulled the battery pack out and plugged in our phones.  It'll be nice to have a fully charged phone in case our electricity isn't restored very quickly.

It did make me realize that I need to get or make a adapter to plug my ham radio into my charging station.  My ham radio will run a long time in listen mode, which is great to listen to the storm reports, but if I need to transmit much it would be nice to be able to recharge it.  I'll have to make that a priority.

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