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Last night a powerful thunderstorm blew through here and took out our power, which is still out. This time of year, living without air conditioning is pretty difficult. Nobody was happy as the temperature in the house crept up to the mid-80s and the only food we could eat was whatever was in the pantry that did not need cooking. If you think of it as a dry run for our shelter-in-place hurricane preparedness program, though, it was quite successful. We found that the insulation on this brick house keeps out a lot of the heat, even on a sunny day, and we had to learn how to use the generator that we bought last year in case of a weather emergency. it turns out to be pretty easy to use, and there was exactly one place where we could put it.

One unhappy side effect of losing power and cranking up the generator was scaring the crap out of the puppy. In the backyard it is as loud as a monster truck and he's afraid to go out there now even when it's turned off. One hopes that he'll get over that pretty soon.

Another lesson learned--a lot of the food in our emergency hurricane kit requires cooking. We need a camp stove!