My apologies for missing last week, I was out of town for a training and just got back that Saturday.
I have multiple articles on the hook, or in the queue, and real life keeps throwing me curve balls. Those I can handle, but the knuckleball I got on Thursday was a bit harder. We were hit with an ice storm (rain during freezing temperatures, trees and everything gets a coat of ice) overnight on Groundhog Day. Thursday the power went out, and as of Monday, as I write this, it's still out.
Which brings me to my point: I have several articles on preparedness (aka "Prepping") and I never had the time to set up a section and banner for it, but that's my top priority as of now.
I was mostly prepared for this outage. The only thing I lacked was a generator. Well, I have one now. Luckily the utility gas hasn't stopped, so all I needed to do was have enough of a generator to power the furnace. I have a propane heater that can keep a single room warm and enough propane to keep it going for over a week. The family and pets were hunkered down in there until I got things working again. It took two trips to towns outside the affected area (450 miles total) to first get a too-small generator (the last one they had) and then get one adequate for my needs.
So right now we are warm, and the family has their computers and Internet to keep them entertained. The refrigerators and stove are working, but the microwave is not. We are using headlamps at night, thankfully we have lots of batteries for them. The next outage I will be able to run lights and the essential stuff as well. I just have to do the work to know amperage and the what and how to "backfill" the house with power but not to energize the external lines. There will be an article on that.