Last Saturday as I write this, Baltimore City experienced a pretty violent set of wind storms that took down a lot of trees and caused a lot of damage, particularly to power lines. Here at Casa del Garrett I was without power for 14 hours (I thought it was 12 but when I checked the alarm system logs it was more like 14). On my street several cars were damaged by downed tree limbs. The little old lady across the street had no telephone service because Voice Over IP which is about all you can get anymore for a landline, stops working when the power goes out. I let her use my cell phone to call her family.

I’m fine, my house is fine, my car is fine, but I ended up losing a bunch of food because the fridge and the chest freezer stopped working. I had a plan to use the freezer packs I keep frozen and handy, plus maybe buy some ice when the power went out, and save as much food as I could in the big IGLOO travel cooler. But I’d put the travel cooler into storage because it takes up space and I thought I could always go get it whenever I needed it. I have a small storage room in a facility within walking distance of the house. But the storm brought down so many  power lines the outage compassed a large part of the city and my storage facility was also without power. So I couldn’t get into it, so I couldn’t get the travel cooler back home. 

Lesson learned. The travel cooler stays here at home now. I’m also looking into having a whole house generator installed, but those are expensive and the best plan at this retirement income stage of my life might just be to take what food I can with me and go find a motel room somewhere there’s still power. I might buy a small portable generator just for the fridge and freezer though. I’m still thinking it all over.

Of course I took a bunch of photos of the local damage. Post some of those here later.