AJ: blackout

Well, the power finally gave out. It was a miracle that it lasted as long as it did. It was during the recent bit of ice rain that it went down. Luckily the generator automatically kicked in. The thing is as big as a cube van, and has enough juice to keep this electricity hog of a building running at full output for a week before it needs to refuel.

Luckily its not very loud, but we have picked up a few droolers who must have been nearby when it kicked in. It sort of kicked back when it comes on, so thats probably attrated them. This has brought something to a head that I've been arguing for for awhile. Basically we need to start getting ready for winter, and get some fuel in here. We have the food thing in hand, and we have a plan for that. But all this lovely technology we have is going to require things, and upkeep. Most ofthe mechanical stuff is no problem. The generators a dumb diesal thing, and between my father and bobby both of them are pretty good with that. And diesal shouldnt pose a problem. Push comes to shove I start using vegetable oil. No problems there. Other things, tho, thats going to be a problem. We are going to need water soon. The water pressure dropped a few hours after the power went out. I think right now we are just siphoning off of the reserve tank up by the tai namara (howerver its spelled) that had a top off of about 1,000,000 gallons. So god only knows how long thats going to last us. I don't want to rely on it forever anyway, it would probably get stale in there or something. Wish I had more info on how long it will stay good in that tank before it starts to get skunky.

On another note. The power outage must have switched the phones into some sort of emergency mode. Or hung up all those phones off the hook or something. Before we were only getting fast busy signal, or a pre recorded message, but since the outage some of the kids were playing with the phones and got a dial tone. So far no numbers dialed have answered. We have a couple of people doing a 24 hour rotation with the phone book just dialing numbers. We havn't been able to get any circuits outside of the island, so some sort of circuit must be down there. The internet is still sporadic at best, the few sites that are still up arent being updated, and the major news outlet havn't been updated in awhile. Though a few blogs are still posting. Found this odd little russian site that seems to have a recent news report, but its in russian so i have no idea what they are saying. Babel fish has been gone for awhile, so im lost.

anyone speak russian? www.fakerussiannewssite . com