GregHowley.com

Connectipocalypse

November 2, 2011 -

As you may have heard, Connecticut currently has a bit of a problem. The heavy, wet snow that fell this past weekend was far earlier than any reasonable snowstorm has a right to be. As such, there were still lots of leaves on the trees, which meant that the trees held a lot more snow than normal. The extra weight took down lots of trees. Lots and lots of trees. I can't walk a block without seeing multiple trees and power lines down. Out walking, I've got to keep crossing the street to avoid downed branches and power lines - honestly, they're everywhere. It's surreal.

It's Wednesday night now, and CL&P is still reporting that 93% of its customers in my town (West Hartford) are without electricity.

The town where I work is slightly better, as only 88% of customers there have no power, but my workplace has been closed all week, and I've been home. Amazingly, my house is part of the 2% that has had power all along, although we've been without internet access since a branch broke off a tree in our front yard and took down the phone and cable lines that run from the street to our house. Still, people have had major league damage. My cousin's girlfriend lost her back porch to a tree, and there are reports of deaths due to downed power lines, falling trees, and carbon monoxide poisoning from running generators or grills indoors.

The first day home, Lia and I built a snowman. It's the first time since second grade that I've built a snowman using the roll-the-snow method. With this kind of heavy wet snow, it rolled up into a huge cylinder, leaving a track of bare grass in its wake. I pulled a muscle lifting the huge second snowboulder onto the first, and the end result was a snowman over five feet tall and quite wide. The thing probably weighed more than I do. I've got a great picture, but I'll have to upload it once I have ftp access. My only internet access right now is via my Android phone, and although text entry via Swype is far better than most mobile keyboards, I'd still never attempt a blog entry of this length without a real keyboard. So I'm typing this into notepad, transferring it into my phone via a usb cable, and then using Android's copy/paste functionality to add this to my blog.

The other cool thing we did recently is set Lia up to play the iPad version of Scribblenauts. If you're unfamiliar with the game, it presents you with problems and allows you to enter text to create any object you can think of. At first, I sat with Lia and let her play, helping her spell any words she needed. Then I had the bright idea to fetch her kids' dictionary, which ended up working out brilliantly. Any time she needed to spell a word, she looked it up. My favorite is that she created a dinosaur which attacked her. So she erased the dinosaur and created a nice dinosaur, which was then friendly. She did all this on her own, with no prompting or advice. Awesomesauce.

It looks like I'm back to work tomorrow morning, so maybe I'll be able to use that internet connection to upload some photos and include them here.