Backyard Autumn Night Sky in New Jersey.
Moonlit night sky with the clouds rolling in.
Four images taken with a Nikon D2xs and 17-55 mm f/2.8 lens (ISO 100, 17 mm, f/2.8, 6 sec)
David's Images of the Day Photoblog
Moonlit night sky with the clouds rolling in.
Four images taken with a Nikon D2xs and 17-55 mm f/2.8 lens (ISO 100, 17 mm, f/2.8, 6 sec)
I am happy! Power to the house was restored yesterday. When I woke up this morning, power was still on and the house was warm. With the time change, the sun was just coming up through my bedroom window rather than getting up in the dark. I’m thinking of having a Sunday roast chicken dinner with lots of garlic.
With the power restored, I restarted the backup of my server and image collection. I was finally able to start reviewing and process images from the New Mexico trip. One teaser image is of Noah’s Ark from the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta.
The Drobo disk array where I store my images started beeping. The error message told me the storage space was nearly full and that I needed to add some bigger hard drives. We will see how long this takes, and hope that the power stays on for the upgrade to process. I followed the instructions and did a hot swap of the 2 TB drive with a yellow light with a 3 TB drive. After many, many minutes I finally got a message that the new hard drive was recognized — but that the Drobo disk array will require ~38 hours for the data protection process to complete. In the mean time I am making other backups. I am looking forward to the Seagate 4 TB hard drives becoming available at a reasonable cost. With these I could double the size of my image collection.

Before the power can be restored, there is a lot of cleanup work that needs to be done. One of the transformers that went down has been leaking oil for several days. It is not known if the oil contained PCBs. A PSE&G truck was sent out to put absorbent down to clean up the oil. Unfortunately, at least one driver (in the last image) had been giving the PSE&G worker a hard time because he wasn’t being allowed to drive through the oil and under the downed power lines. The PSE&G folks are working 16 hour days to restore power and need to be acknowledged – not hassled.




Power went out again. PSE&G says it could be a week or more before everyone has power restored. I’ve moved back into my RV (White Ram). I should have enough diesel and propane for several days. I also have about 40 gallons of water. Before I retired, the Safeway stores in PA closed and I bought a lot of food for an emergency. Looks like I will get to use it.








Hurricane Sandy Getting Closer
When I woke up this morning, only light rain and little wind. As the day progressed the rain got heavier and the wind increased. This still does not seem like a tropical storm as the temperature is only in the mid 50’s °F. Now that the wind is increasing, there have been several power glitches. I decided to grill this Porterhouse steak I got from Mallery’s Grazin Meats before the power goes out. Once the power goes out, no idea how long it will be before power will be restored. I have everything in the RV (water, food, fuel) ready for a few days.
The power just went off at 5 PM.
