After four days and three nights with no power, I'm officially declaring this the craziest storm that I've been through. We finally got our power back on this morning and the house is just about returned to normal this evening. For the non-Olympians out there, here's a run down of what made this storm so nuts.

We had a few inches of snow on the ground going into Tuesday night. Overnight we got an additional 14 inches which was a record for a one day total. When morning came the snow changed into frozen rain and coated everything with a layer of ice. The snow up on tree branches froze in place.

As this continued on into the evening, branches and trees started dropping all over the place. Our yard went from this scene on Wednesday:

 To this on Thursday:

It's hard to tell in this picture but there are two power lines (maybe cable lines?) being pulled down about to the limits by the tree on the left. Fortunately it hasn't been very windy or things could have been much worse.

We survived well since we had hot water and a nice fireplace with plenty of wood. It was a little eerie going into the grocery store only on auxiliary power and most of the store in the dark. I've never seen the power off in Olympia for more than a day so we could have been a little more prepared but we got by ok.

After the first day it started to get a bit tiresome until we started thinking of it more as an unplanned camping trip. A trip that could suddenly end at any moment and magically transport us back to our house. So as vacations go it was pretty great. No travel time, no need to pack, a comforable place to stay, and a grocery store a four minute walk away. 

I'm ranking this storm above the snow storm we had three years ago even though we got a lot more snow and it lasted for a long time, we never lost power then. I'm also putting it ahead of the inaugural day storm in 1993. That storm had the freezing rain coating everything and had high winds, but most power was recovered quickly as there was no snow to contend with. In that storm we only lost power for for less than 12 hours. This one was also a little worse in that the ice was not anticipated. The large snow fall was expected but no one was talking about the freezing rain until it came.

I'm sure my Grandparents will rank the blizzard of 1950 above this one though, which probably would merit the top spot on it's own but my Mom was also born in the middle of it (Happy Birthday Mom!).

What's the craziest storm you've endured?

Now that you've unwrapped your presents (or your kids presents) and you've got a handful of new devices that require batteries it's time to ask the question 'Should I get recharchable batteries?'. The answer is yes, but make sure you get the right kind (skip to the last section if this sort of thing makes your head spin).

A History of Recharchable Batteries

When I was a kid we had NiCad batteries, they didn't hold their charges all that long and even when fully charged, they didn't have as much power as the standard alkalines. In the mid-ninties with the advent of NiMH recharchables they fell out of favor. The NiMH batteries contained as much power as alkalines, but they would loose their charges completely after a few weeks. These were great for high drain devices such as cameras and CD players but were poor choices for low drain items such as clocks or remotes or anything where you'd typically not have to change the batteries after two weeks.

And Then Out of Nowhere

Only a few years ago the folks at Sanyo came out with a 'low self-discharge NiMH battery' under the brand Enloop. They have good capacity and can hold their charges for a couple of years.  I've been using them for a couple of years and I've been very pleased. For a while Enloops were the batteries in this class. Now there are similar offerings from Duracell and Rayovac.

Bottom Line

If you're buying batteries, look for recharchables branded as 'Pre-Charged' or 'Low Self-Discharge' and you'll be set. They will work with any NiMH charger you may already have. You can pick them up form Amazon and I've found them at Costco over the last month. Costco seems to only stock them around Christmas time but that may be different for you. They usually run about $2 - $2.50 per battery. They are only found in AA or AAA form factor at this point. You can buy some adapters where you essentuially just put a a AA battery inside of a case for a C or D battery.

Over the last month, in between all of Gwen's treatments, we've been toiling away redesigning our website. There are still a few more things that we're going to add to it but we decided it's ready to face the world now. The only real new feature is the site search at this point but more is on its way. I'm going with a 'command line' motif for now. I may change it at some point but I think there is a rule preventing you from changing your design more often than actually writing. The other pages have some pictures whose origins I'll let Gwen write about at a later date. 

I know what you're all asking though, what language is this writen in??? I'm still using MonkCMS for our backend but I rewrote the front end site in Node.js. I'm also using Redis for caching. Node.js can be pretty challenging at times as it really makes you think about what you are doing, but it offers some pretty steller performance. There are some pages that used to take six seconds to come up pre-cached that now come up in a second. I think I've worked out the kinks, but please drop me a line if you see anything out of place.

While scanning the newspaper of my track triumph in 1989 I saw some awesome ads on the other side of the paper. I thought I'd share them with the world. Click the image to view the full size.

I was really surprised how expensive these things are, even in 1989 dollars.

I've been in the newspaper twice in my life. Both times I was running and wearing short shorts. Both were in races which I won and they were close to being exactly ten years apart. Sadly the fall of 2009 wasn't as triumphant but I'm feeling good about 2019 so long as short shorts come back into style by then.

The above was a YMCA relay race which I anchored and won. I have many fond memories of those races growing up.

This was one of my last cross country races. It was the only varsity race that I won in all of high school. Lucky for me it was a big meet and one that The Olympian was covering. Check out the rest of the story if you are interested.