This week was dominated by the outages. There was a big storm Monday night, and about 12:30 am the power went off. I was already asleep, but everyone else was still awake. When I got up for work Tuesday morning the power was still off. And still off at lunchtime, and when I was out of work. The power company was saying by then that their crews were all working on the hardest hit areas (not us), that they couldn't provide a timeline for when power might be back, and that some customers might have a multi-day outage. Well, it was awfully hot in the house with no A/C, and I was starting to get worried about the meat in the freezer outside. Fortunately, Trey at work has a generator, and he never lost power in this storm, so he let me use it until the power came back. Just after work Tuesday we ran up to his house and loaded it into my truck, then I ran it back to my house and got it fired up. We just ran extension cords to the fridge, freezer, some fans, and the pool (was afraid it would get icky with no filter) and got them running. I'm not sure how we would have powered the A/C, but it was a whole-house generator and had the power for it. Also not sure how much gas it goes through. Anyway, we had the essentials covered, so the meat was saved. It was about 5 hours later that the power finally came back on. 

The second outage was in IT. On Friday morning, I tried to log on to my computer at work and just had the blue screen of death. Rebooting did nothing helpful, nor rebooting again. Then I started hearing that everybody's computer had the blue screen because of the Crowdstrike update that was rolled out overnight. Well, we didn't know what it was at first. Neither did anyone. All anyone knew was our computers weren't working. So basically nothing could be done. Across the board. Almost everyone on the shop floor was sent home because nobody could do anything. Well, since it was my birthday I decided to take the rest of the day off myself. It was later in the day that IT seemed to have a handle on what happened, and Saturday morning they sent out instruction for everyone to run through to fix it. Undoing the update, or something like that. Running through the instructions seemed to fix the problem on the first try, so I should be good to go Monday.

Speaking of my birthday, It was Friday. 55. We didn't do anything special but the kids and Beth ordered me some presents online (couple games, a Hannibal Lecter action figure, and some cycling gloves) and they got me a carrot cake. We did presents and went out to dinner at Oak & Alley.

On the new car front, Beth and I drove a nice 2017 Hyundai Santa Fe (like the one we rented last summer!) this week; Best Deal had one and moved it down from another store so we could drive it. I asked them to hold it for a few days so I could get it checked out and get all the financing taken care of. However Beth doesn't like the color, and it's bigger than she wanted. So on Saturday we went to Goshen to look at the smaller Hyundai Tucson at the dealer there, but Beth looked at and drove a 2020 Santa Fe that she liked better and was in a better color. However it was a lot more expensive. She's trying to figure out if the color on the '17 is a deal breaker. 

After looking at the Hyundai dealer in Goshen, we went over to Shipshewana to meet Marve and Beth for dinner at the Blue Gate. They had just asked if we could meet for dinner and drove down her just to see us. So we did the shops and got dinner and had a nice time together before heading back home.