Sep 16 2008
wow..been busy much?
so we haven’t really posted anything recently. I’ll try to catch up on whats new:
Thursday last week we finally sold our house on Ackerly Drive. The girl who bought it seems really nice and I’m sure she will enjoy the house. We are now the owners of only one home and thankful for that!
Sean caught another cold recently. Has had some coughing and sniffles. Nights have been a tad restless for him, but we have had quite a few 7:15 wake-ups which we will take any day of the week over 5:30 or 6am!
Sunday was not a fun day. My mom sent an email telling us of the fun she had bailing out the basement and cleaning gutters during a downpour and 40 mile an hour winds. I knew that wasn’t good because storms in St. Louis usually make their way to Cincinnati. Around 2pm on Sunday we started getting major wind storms. It was reported that the CVG Airport saw them as strong as 74mph. Our yard is a mess…and on top of that I had to go into work because we lost power in both datacenters. By 330pm or so, I was in the datacenter helping to stabilize power issues, shut down non-essential systems, and migrate database servers to our backups that use less power. I finally left work around 430am on Monday and got to sleep around 515am. The power came back on for us around 530am (which woke us up), so we had to shut down TVs, lights, etc. and close windows.
I woke up at 8am so I could get back to the office by 9am to sit with the generators and monitor servers and networks. We had a couple of flickers at the office and finally regained full power at 2pm almost on the dot.
Then began the fun times of moving servers off reserve power and getting things back to normal. Out of all the power outages we’ve had in the DCs, this was one of the smoothest in both going offline and come back online. It was also a great test on our generators since we went almost a full 24 hours on them.
While the power did come on at our house, it apparently went back out around 930 or 10am. There are trees in the lines at both ends of our street (I got video of it, will try to post it later). The tree at the south end of Graves caught fire, which we are told caused the Transformer (I am unsure if it was a Decepticon or not…but I think so) to blow out. I think Graves ave was the only street in a few block proximity to not have power. Fabulous. Say good bye to everything in the fridge. Don’t worry – I managed to make sure the beer was consumed before it got warm! Whew, that was close!
If you are curious about what a major power outage looks like, you can track Duke Energy’s work on their website HERE (note, use IE..it locks up firefox). At 730pm on Sunday the number out was 688k and change. At 1pm today it was down to 563,000. I’ve seen it as low as 548,000. They are estimating it could take five to seven days to get most of the people online. 90% of their customers were without power. There is another electric company in KY and combined with Duke, over 850,000 customers were without power. Ohio declared a state of emergency yesterday.
Emily took Sean to his new Daycare today. New Daycare you ask? Well yes. Last Monday I was handed a note on my way out of daycare after dropping Sean off. They were closing their doors as of Sept 12. Uh..thanks for the four day notice. Luckily Emily did a bunch of research when we were looking for a daycare and she found one that was only a few streets over with one slot open in their zero to 24 month classes (I say class cause we are calling it school for Sean so he gets used to that word early on). They were also willing to take on a 3 day a week schedule for him, which is rare for daycare these days! ALSO they do weekend and late night baby sitting!! Sounds great right? It gets better! They are opening a new daycare facility for the zero to 24 month old kids…and its right down the street on Graves Ave! Only a block away! So, some clouds to have silver linings.
I’m sure I’ve missed some other updates, but can’t think of them now.
