Saturday morning dawned with just some breezy, misty conditions and as I heard the latest forecast calling for Dorian to be a strong Category One hurricane I headed outside to bring in some objects like ladders that I didn’t want to see become destructive missiles,
At 10:30, the power went out for 30 seconds and that’s when I leapt into action – filled two big jugs with water, filled the bathtub for flushing and made two large thermoses of coffee, and somehow had time to jump in the shower. Five minutes after I stepped out of the shower the power went out and stayed out.
For the rest of Saturday I either read ebooks on my two tablets or watched a few Netflix episodes that I’d downloaded the day before. Went to bed early Saturday night with the wind howling and shaking the house and woke up Sunday morning to blue skies and great news! Not a solitary roof shingle on the lawn! I wasn’t expecting that!
I dug out the portable propane campstove and put on a pot of coffee and noticed that both of my tablets’ batteries had died. What to do with the rest of my day? I actually thought I’d be doing a lot of cleanup after the hurricane but other than a few leaves on the lawn, there was nothing to do. So I built a computer.
I’m probably going to regret putting a computer together without power to test it out, but I’ll find out when the power comes back on. It’s been years since I put together a computer so a lot has changed. No, strike that, everything has changed! I had picked up all the parts over the summer during sales and Amazon Prime day and my last piece of the computer puzzle had arrived last week – a new Corsair Power Supply so I had no excuse for not assembling this thing. For the geeks out there, It’s an MSI X470 motherboard, an AMD Ryzen 7 CPU and Wraith cooler, along with one of these dinky M.2 SSD’s, some RGB decorated ram, and a computer case with more fans than my last four computers combined. I wasn’t sure if I was building a drone or a computer with all the fans!
One thing that hasn’t changed is those teeny, tiny connectors from the power switch and led’s on the case to the motherboard. Those things are still around and a total pain to deal with. What did surprise me was how easy it was to install the AMD CPU and fan to the motherboard. I don’t know if Intel has simplified the process, but it was certainly a breeze to pop the AMD CPU in and attach the fan, and , get this, it already had thermal paste applied to the cooler! Once I get my power back I’ll let you know if this was a good idea or not.
The rest of Sunday was spent either cooking on the campstove or boiling water for washing. I didn’t get a chance to go camping this summer, so I guess this will count as camping!
So, for those of you without power and possibly screentime, how are you coping?
