eftychia: Me in kilt and poofy shirt, facing away, playing acoustic guitar behind head (Default)
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posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 03:21pm on 2004-05-31

*grumble*

The electricity went out just before 1:00 this morning. It wasn't off too terribly long, but my LAN is a bit persnickety to reboot (for one thing, there's a machine that needs to boot first, then another needs to be brought up and a bunch of stuff that doesn't initialize correctly yet has to be started by hand, then the first one gets rebooted, after which I can start the other machines -- you can tell this isn't something I do often), and since my UPS died, I worry about filesystem corruption when the lights go out. Well no sooner had I gotten everything running again and set the VCR clock, when the power went out again.

There were no thunderstorms near enough for me to hear, and what rain we did get fell so softly I couldn't hear it unless I stood by an open window. (I don't know about the weather on the entire path from the nearest generating plant to my house, of course.) I don't know what happened, and lacking nine D-cell batteries for the portably telly, I was cut off from useful news reports. The power stayed off until afternoon, long enough for the ice cubes in my freezer to round their edges and flatten their bottoms, but not long enough to entirely stop being ice-cube shaped. I'm guessing that the food in the freezer is probably okay, but I'm concerned about the stuff that was in the fridge section. Ifwhen my antihistamine kicks in, I'll start sniffing stuff.

I am annoyed. Not necessarily at BGE (the local power company) since I have no way of knowing whether this was one of those unavoidable delays due to freakish damage, but definitely feeling snarly at the universe. It's not like I'd just been to the grocery store and filled up the fridge, but money is tight enough for me to feel upset about any food going bad ... and I felt cut off all morning and the first part of the afternoon (I'm only just now back up and running) ... and my special Memorial Day QotD is getting posted late ... and I'm just feeling all growly and snarly in general. An awful lot of my to-do list requires electricity. (And much of the rest requires light, and I didn't feel like trying to juggle enough candles at once when it was still dark. Actually, with the weather today, the house has been pretty dark even since sunup.)

But I did find out what the funny/bad smell in the house was. (I didn't think I'd let the dishes sit that long...) Perrine finally did kill a mouse that she caught. And she left it tucked neatly in between some of her other toys where I didn't notice it until I reached down to pick one up to throw it for her and found a well-dead mouse in my hand. Ewwww. I think there's another one I haven't found yet.

There are 3 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
cellio: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] cellio at 01:00pm on 2004-05-31
Food in a fridge that has stayed closed should be fine for the amount of time your power was out (sounds like about 12 hours?). I'd worry about meat, but you're a vegetarian so I assume you didn't have any.

Our fridge once died to the level of thawed veggies in the freezer (probably 14-16 hours before discovery of the problem) and we didn't lose much. The meat that had been in the freezer was thawed by still cold, so I found ways to cook it. (You can't safely re-freeze meat.) I think I decided the opened quart of milk was iffy and tossed it. Everything else was fine.
 
posted by [identity profile] dglenn.livejournal.com at 03:13am on 2004-06-02
Thanks. I was most concerned about the milk and the mayonnaise. I think the mayo is okay; the milk not so much. And the half of an onion got pretty icky, but I don't know whether that was because it warmed up too much, or (more likely) because it froze when the fridge to over-enthusiastic at some point before the power went out (it freezes things sometimes) and a bunch of cell walls ruptured. Mostly I was just being extremely grumpy and it was one more thing to be grumpy about.
cellio: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] cellio at 11:29am on 2004-06-02
Ah, I forgot about the possibility of mayo. If it was still cool to the touch it's probably ok; if it warmed up to something closer to room temperature I'd probably toss it (on the "toss the potato salad at the picnic after three hours" principle). But I don't do a lot with mayo myself so I'm just channeling my mother here. :-)

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