Change of plans today…

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On a nice day today, our power up at the house went out about at about 11:50am. If it was going to happen, the timing turned out to be not so bad.

I was playing a little poker a little earlier, and was the short stack with 7 people left in a 1-table SnG. I was dealt a pair of 7’s and pushed all 415 of my chips in the middle. The button called, and the blinds both folded. The button had K8 of spades. Basically, a really stupid call on his part, but he definitely had the chips to afford it, so he did it.

He caught an 8 on the river, of course, and I was out. The power went out 2 minutes later. So, had I hit the hand, and had 920 chips, I would have been much more annoyed at losing by being cut off, than by losing to bad luck, seriously.

After checking with a neighbor, whose power was out too, I called ConEd. After reporting the problem, I received an automated call that the power would be back on by 4pm. What to do without any Internet connectivity? 😉

We both started reading for a while (how quaint). But, given that we’re both always exhausted, we both ended up napping for a while. I never do that (even when I know I will enjoy it), but Lois often can’t keep her head up on weekends, since she sleeps even more poorly than I do.

The power came on at 3:50pm, 10 minutes before predicted, and exactly 4 hours after it went off…

I have two 18-year-old APC UPS devices. They each weigh something like 3 tons (OK, not quite that much, but you wouldn’t want to lift either one). One of them barely holds a charge when the power goes out, but nothing critical is connected to it. The other one still works well, this many years later. I have my Asterisk machine connected to it. Basically, most of our power outages last a few minutes at most, and I don’t want the machine to reboot unnecessarily.

Here’s the part that I can’t explain. The machine stayed up the entire 4 hours. However, after the power came back up, and I was able to make a call (so the machine was in a good state!), it somehow lost it’s mind. It was still up, but no longer serving up anything (not even pingable). It rebooted cleanly, and is working perfectly again, but I can’t explain the behavior. I run it headless, so I couldn’t easily see any error messages, and didn’t care enough to connect a monitor, etc.

Anyway, we’re back to normal, and thankful for the little things, like a fan and a microwave. 🙂