It seems to be done now – as I wrote those words, the sun came out. Perhaps My Run of Bad Luck is over.

 

Around our neighborhood, in fact, there was mostly very good luck. Only a few big trees went down, and it looks like minimal property damage.

 

Excellent luck at this address – at worst the electricity flickered last night, and a fair-sized limb dropped onto the back roof. Otherwise, it was just a great evening to watch the forces of nature in action.

 

Apparently I’m an exception, though, as the rest of the metro area didn’t do so well. There are millions of homes without power, and the water supply in Fairfax County (suburban Virginia) was contaminated after the treatment plants lost electricity (no back-up generators, apparently). Alexandria, as usual, is swimming in floodwater.

 

~

 

While I think that emergency planning is always a good idea, I think that OPM and WMATA overreacted a bit. The Federal government really didn’t need to close for the full day yesterday, and today I drove downtown with little trouble. On the other hand, erring on the side of safety makes sense. I’m just not sure whether an error of that magnitude was justified.

 

(Edited to say: It was. Completely. If for no other reason than you really didn’t want to squeeze millions of people who had not had a shower for a day or two into office buildings the next day . . .. The streets of Arlington and downtown DC were filled with thousands of people looking for something to do last night, and there were quite a few you didn’t want to get too close to.

 

~

 

I went for a walk around the neighborhood early this morning, to see what had happened. Mostly branches and limbs everywhere, but one street was blocked by a tree, and another tree will make some new homeowners quite upset. A giant maple (at least 70 foot) took out their deck and detached garage. The house was just bought a week ago. Ouch.

Today’s Mileage: 10.40 miles

 

2003 Mileage:
24.58 miles

 

It was a long slow ride along the floodpaths down to the Potomac. Along the way, I saw a number of families who had come down to the river to gather water, using trashbins lined with plastic bags. They were walking, otherwise I would have invited them over to my house to use the hose.

 

The riding itself was more a test of my nerves than my knee – the path was wet, filled with lots of debris that made it very slippery. This made for something of a white knuckled ride, but in the end I was glad I stuck it through – again I had done something I did not think I was prepared to do.