We’ve been having power brownouts lately. They started a little over a month ago. From around 12:30 am our power has been browning out, sometimes as close as 5 to 10 minutes apart. It goes on until after 3 am. Our neighbor, who is also on our power box, told us they have issues too. Lights not working for awhile, then all of the sudden coming on again.

We have been calling the power company, who comes out (even at 1 am – I was surprised), and they tell us it might be the dew, an improper ground on our neighbors house, even dirt. They dusted off the meter box inside once, and said “log the times”… maybe we can figure this out. It rebooted our systems 3 times last night. We have already lost a dishwasher and a battery backup to power problems. I recently backed off all my files and burned them to CD’s, before we lose any computer’s drive. Until last night, when three power trucks came out and woke us up just before dawn, ringing the doorbell non-stop to tell us, we weren’t crazy after all, they saw the lights flicker just before they left…… argh!

On the bright side, once during an outage, I managed to knit a litte more by candle-light. That was actually very relaxing and easier to do than I thought it would be. As I knitted along, I dreamed of living a life where the power company was not a necessity. If it wasn’t for the flammability issues with small children – I definitely would consider it!

Slobo was talking about a backup software that can burn full and incremental backups to DVD’s. Having worked in the past as a systems analyst, one thing I miss about home computer software, is a great backup software. Acronis makes a product that looks really good. It will back up the software and keys too, which would be great. I’m always trying to round up CD’s and remember what I had on the computer before each restore. Each time I have to do a ‘clean’ install, it’s like my house – I know before I cleaned, I had a particular item and can’t find it. Here’s hoping the power company gets sick of us calling soon!