It was a typhoon night and day...

So here I am, online once again and tapping out a real blog entry instead of just Twitter posts. For a change, I'm using the Blue PC, and enjoying the wide-screen yumminess. It's going to be fun working on my photo backlog later with this baby.

As most folks probably know by now, we had a typhoon come roaring through the south-central part of the country. The province where Ma's only sister lives is one of the hardest hit, and as soon as we know that the phone lines are up, we're going to be checking on her.

For us here at home, typhoon Frank/Fengshen gave us a very Bulmer-Lytton early morning. Ramon and I were up at four in the morning thanks to the roaring wind and the rumble of the back neighbors' generator. They're on a different power grid from us, and lost their lights an hour ahead, hence the rumbling.

Once we confirmed that our own lights had gone down, Ramon and I then made our way outside. The cold wind that came blasting through the front door on our way to the genset blew every shred of sleep from our bodies. We got the genset started, and it was on for about twelve hours or so. Of course we had no television or internet as a result, but that didn't matter very much to me, as I had any number of offline activities to fill the time.

For example: I finally got around to burning all the files that have been hanging out on my hard drive for nearly four months. Gods, it was a tedious process, but I am happy to say that as a result, I now know how to burn files using the Windows Vista utility. (Note: I'm still working with the Windows Vista Starter Edition that came with the laptop. I still feel no need for upgrading it.)

Multi-tasked by knitting while the burning was going on. I have made good progress with my Roman stitch sampler; it's made up of the yarn I used for the practice swatches I made when I was first learning to knit. That's one thing nice about knitting and crochet - if you rip up your work, you can always use the yarn again. ::grin::

Then of course, there was the chance to sleep; I certainly made the most of it. I attribute today's sunny disposition at being able to pay off the last of my sleep debt - a deficit caused by stress and my own mental aberrations. Ramon also managed to recover the sleep lost from his tummy going into a hissy-fit the day before the typhoon visited us. He recovers faster now from such things; even his migraine-like attacks don't last as long as they used to.

The power came back on around 5PM yesterday, as the winds calmed and were replaced by rain. I took advantage of a lull in the rain to get the maid to help me reload the genset with diesel, since we were down to the last line before an empty tank. The fresh fuel brought the genset up to half a tank of fuel, and it turned out the refill was a good thing - power went down at 8PM, right in the middle of burning a DVD. ::pffft::

Back into the rain to turn on the genset! Continued to burn and knit, and managed to finish everything by around 11PM, when the power came back on. I knew this because my little TV suddenly burst into life with the episode of Deal or No Deal hosted by Howie Mandel that was shot in Manila. Finally, after all this time, I understand how the game is played!

That's the recap from Typhoon Sunday. The details of Morning-After Monday should properly be in a separate post. Catch you when I catch you!

:)