The Thursday night winds and Kael's cold ended up keeping us up a good portion of this last Thursday night.  I woke up with no power and headed up to Redmond.  The MS campus had only backup power for lights but no internet connectivity.  A coworker and I ended up heading to one of the data centers to work that day since they have backup systems to keep them running regardless of the power supply.  After work it took forever to get home.  Our neighborhood still had no power.  My parents live only a few miles away and have a generator and a wood pellet stove.  My wife and son spent the day there and we ended up spending the night.  The power came back on at our house sometime in the early afternoon thankfully.  It is now in the 50s inside our house which is better than the 40 degrees it was earlier this morning when we came to check it out.  We did not get any damage from the winds though I was keeping a close eye on the large evergreen trees that line our backyard that night but thankfully they all stayed standing.

 

After some study of a large insulated box that is built against one side of my garage and some wiring into the electrical panel, it was determined that we could easily put in a generator.  The box has venting specifically to hook up to a exhaust of a generator so it'll vent outside to allow the generator to stay inside the garage.  My parents have two and have offered to give us one of the generators on long term loan so they don't have to store it.  We just have to switch a plug around and during the next power outage, we'll be able to power our essentials: the furnace, refrigerator, a few lights and our home entertainment system.  Happily, we only lost power at our home for about 37 hours.  Next time we'll be prepared.