A WEEK THAT BEGAN WITH SNOW ENDS WITH ICE . . . The big winter storm I wrote about earlier this week from Colorado finally caught up with me here in St. Louis, where a night of falling ice knocked out power to more than 500,000 power customers, including me.

Since no power means no Internet, the storm also displaced today's regularly-scheduled "gadget update," which I normally would have written last night.  Thinking about it this morning, I recalled an earlier gadget update from July: "The Guardian 7-13 kW Air-Cooled Standby Generator." It's a post that deserves to be read again. I wish I would have taken my own advice and had one of those things installed.

Meanwhile, power is up at the office. I brought two of the kids here with me, where one is doing her homework and the other is doing the Vioxx filing she's responsible for once or twice a week. It wasn't the way they'd planned to spend their snow day, which happens to be the first one of their entire lives. (Back in the 70s, we used to get at least five snow days per year here in St. Louis. Someone call Al Gore!)

Tonight might be a little better. After calling twelve different hotels, we finally lined up a couple of rooms. The kids are planning on watching movies. While they're doing that, I'll be making phone calls to the house and hoping the answering machine picks up. When it does, it's good news: it means the power's back on.

Comments

[Matt Schuh]

Count me among those without power as well. Today being the last day of classes for the semeseter, it actually provides a nice incentive to stay in the library and actually study.