Haha! Killer cicadas.

The newer ones will let you block everything but hurricane and tornado warnings. And since even a regular t-storm wakes me up…

I don’t think any of them let you muffle the watches and only alarm on the warnings. That’s compounded by the fact that the people running the system seem to have lost about 60% of their competency over the last year. Sometimes the warning goes off and never stops until you manually disable it. Sometimes it just doesn’t go off, even though there actually is a relevant warning.

In the current instance, someone has misinterpreted the rule about “curtailing our regular broadcasts.” That doesn’t mean you drop everything except the flood warning for Lake County. It means you cut back the long term and marine forecasts to just the next 24 hours. But no, they dropped everything this morning and just repeated the flash flood warning again and again and again…

The refrigerator is probably going to have some losses, but again, if you keep it closed a lot of stuff will be fine. Just try to use it up fast once the power comes back on.

No power outage here, which is unusual. We often go down when there’s just a little breeze and no storm. No flooding either, though there was a lot of wind, rain, and lightning. The weather radio is stuck repeating the flood warning for your area over and over, and won’t even give the short term forecast. I would think it still matters whether we are likely to get more storms today or tonight, but apparently the entire region no longer exists except for the flooding along highway 173.

The radio screamed at me around 10, but it screams at both watches and warnings. (Thinking about buying one of the $30 ones at Fry’s, to see if I can tell them to only scream at warnings…) That was for a tornado watch, though, so I guess I can’t really complain. Must have had some locally heavy rains (which is no surprise with that sort of system).

It seems we have one night a year I fail to sleep because of storms… Part of that is that I am enough of a weathergeek, though, that I want to watch storms. 🙂

Well, fortunately the only thing we had in the freezer is a couple of containers of ice cream and some frozen chicken breasts. Not too great of a loss. And even the fridge, we’re mainly looking at losing just condiments, dairy products, and eggs. Fortunately, we didn’t have any meat or anything really expensive in there. It’s more of an annoyance than anything. Thanks for the offer though!

Heh. I note that ComEd will only reimburse for the loss of spoiled food if the outage affects more than 30,000 people. We’re out of luck there.

I’ve got a 400w inverter in my car … if you’re interested we could try to give the freezer a little boost.