I just saw this pic of Michigan Ave: [link]

Yeah, it was pretty dead downtown this morning. I saw a guy making snow angels in the road at State and Grand.

The downtown streets have been plowed and some of the sidewalks have been cleared. There is a bit of a dune climb at each curb. My biggest problem today has been coffee. No Starbucks, Dunkies, or Corner Bakery. 7-11 is open, but if I'm gonna drink bad coffee I'll get it for free in the green room.

There's an ad I've been seeing, where we see a garage door open onto a snowy landscape as a solemn voice says, roughly, "There is a group of hikers stranded, and a hungry coyote has just spotted them. If he doesn't get them, hypothermia will." Camera turns to show an SUV in the garage. "Now get out there and pick the kids up from soccer practice."

Yay for the kindness of strangers, Kathy.

It seems to be saying what number of households will lose power, but if they shut it off to an area, wouldn't that be all the people?

I don't think I can explain it without diagrams and waving my hands, but I'll make an awkward attempt. It's really more complicated than this in urban areas, but think of the distribution lines as fanning out like a tree, with branches and sub-branches. The closer the outage is to the substation, the more customers are affected. Events like trees hitting power poles can cause overvoltage on the line. When that happens, things that are essentially fuses open on a number of lines to protect the system. Often when crews get out there, a lot of power can be restored just be resetting those fuses. Down the line, there will be stepdown transformers for a small group of houses and businesses that can blow from overvoltage. The power company thinks of the system as sets of customers served by a particular section of line, which may not correspond to geography.

Hee! I was waiting for Ginger to come explain it to us.

So, it's like you could have 10 houses in a row, but houses 1, 2 and 7 are on one fuse; house 3, 4 and 6 are another fuse, etc. And you can end up with patchy neighborhoods, where 10 out of 20 houses are served by the same substation, but the other 10 are served by another substation?

We have a substation right across the street. At night when it's quiet you can hear the hum.

TJ's chicken pot pie is DISGUSTING. Why didn't you warn me? What a waste of four servings.

That is tragic. Next time get the smaller one in the green box.

Okay, I'm assuming that's not what you got in the first place, but I've certainly seen a larger family-style pot pie in the frozen section and it seems a lot more likely to be 4 servings. The one I've gotten is maybe 6 inches across.

I have to say (confess?) that I mind TJ's prepared foods extremely hit or miss.

I like Marie Callendar's chicken pot pies.

Ahrg. Foiled. 10 laps into my swim, they closed the pool because the lights lost power and it was too dark. Of course, I left work early (got in really early) and had I known this was going to happen, I would've gone up to Parkville. As it is, it is too late for me to go up there and get back in time. So I'm just frustrated.