Being the responsible parents we are, we have Carbon Monoxide alarms in the house, because hey, it’s what you do. Right?

Of course, they have never gone off (knock wood), so you do tend to forget that they exist at all.

Well, yesterday one of those alarms decided that it needed to really remind us that it exists, and that it’s been ten years since we activated it. Because it’s now time to replace it.

Of course, nobody was home - except for the dog. Who is now traumatized by that beeping hell-box that suddenly decided that it was a good idea to tell everybody out of the blue that it needs replacing - at 95dB, just to make sure.

Kidde - I’m sure you could at least start out with just a mild chirp, instead of going full “the bark collar from hell” crazy. No?

@grillchen It’s just naturally fabulous

Well that didn’t last long.

Do I reset my staycation counter to day one, or do I keep this at day six?

Staycation: day five.

Power still off, but outside is warming up. So now it’s a big ice rink outside with people playing bumper cars with the real things.

Not interested in partaking in that particular contact sport, and as a result I’m still not leaving the house even if the worry about frozen pipes is fading.

Instead trying to see how far I can get on the remaining merge window pulls on just battery power. Not very far I bet, but at least something.

PGE claims power back tonight. Of course, they did that yesterday too…

Day four of no power and no Internet. This big tree is the reason. One among hundreds in the area, but this is the one that took out *our* power and Internet.

PGE (Portland General Electric) claims we should get power back by 10pm today, but the ice storm arrives today, so we'll see.

Edit: well, it looks like PGE fixed the outage by just removing me from the outage database, not by actually reconnecting power. That was the second time that happened, so I re-re-reported the outage. Not that I was hugely optimistic about the 10pm timeframe, but it looks even less likely now.