We've lived in this house long enough to have experienced 2 tropical storms: Harvey and Nicholas.

Last night, Nicholas was approaching us at bedtime, and the wind and a bit of rain kicked up. Sometime around 2:30am the power went out. I left it alone, then a little while later it flickered back on briefly, then back out. When the power comes on in our house, several things make a fairly loud beep sound. When the power flickers in the middle of the night, that beeping can be disruptive to my already-light sleep.

I wasn't wearing my watch most of the night to see how I slept, and I didn't take my typical medicines that would assist in my ability to stay asleep. I figure I got segments of sleep lasting about 20 minutes each, with a period of 15-20 minutes awake in between. The awake was partially due to the storm noise, but mostly due to how my body was responding to the weather and the lack of medication. Then when the power went out, those physiological responses got worse, leading to an all around shoddy night, sleep-wise.

I got up around 7:30am and decided that 5 hours off electricity was approaching the maximum for the refrigerator, and it was starting to get warm in the house with the sun peeking through the southern bands of the storm. I somewhat robotically marched out to the garage, flashlight in hand, and laid out the extension cords, wheeled the generator to the back porch, gassed it up, and got everything running. Then I got into the house to get the portable air conditioner going, and Emily helped me with it. Then I sat for a bit to try and recover some energy before I went to boil water on the grill for coffee.

We went for a walk at one point, just to see how the neighborhood faired, and afterwards I decided it was safe to take the meds that I had skipped last night. After I did, I laid down to attempt to sleep, which was interrupted repeatedly by a wound up nearly-six-year-old, until I finally got what felt like 10 hours of sleep (it was maybe 1 hour) and felt better.

At that point, Emily had fixed me some lunch and we sat and enjoyed our food together as a family.

We had some errands to run after that, and while we were out the neighbors sent a text message declaring victory against the lack of power. When we got home, the air conditioner had already brought the house down to the "cold" we like, and we went about getting things back to status quo.

Damage-wise, all I have been able to see so far was one branch off a rotted Japanese Wax tree, which I'm already planning to cut down. The loose bark on the Crepe Myrtle trees was blasted clean off the trees as well. Some neighbors didn't do as well: One reported an uprooted, large tree. Others had fences blown over. Some neighbors reported on Facebook that they heard a tornado blow through the neighborhood overnight. That was probably when I was either actually asleep, or just almost asleep and tuned it out completely.

Total time without power was almost exactly 13 hours. The longest cycle I ran between fuelings on the generator was from 7:30am to 10:30am. I think I only refueled it twice after the initial fueling. I've decided to not take storage actions with it just yet, as there's another storm on the maps that I am unsure about for this next week or so. With that in mind, I prefer to just leave everything ready to go, and refill my fuel supply sometime in the next few days.

All in all, it looks like the area did well, and we did well here, so it wasn't really that bad from our perspective.