So, yes that was a power outage. The main problem at this point is that most of the back streets are still covered with a few inches of packed snow and ice, which in the past 24 hours has been trying to turn into slush and will most likely be solid ice by tomorrow.
Overall we've had about 10 inches or so over the past week, with no intervening warming spells to melt stuff -- which is quite unusual for this area -- never mind that a mere half inch of dusting is usually enough to turn the Seattle area into a useless traffic snarl. And there are very few plows capable of dealing with this, so even a week later, only the main arteries are anything approaching vaguely cleared
Thus, while the outage itself was relatively minor (affecting 100 houses, not like the civilization-ending disaster we had two years ago), it still takes Them a while to actually get to whatever pole has fallen over (or, more likely been knocked over by one of the 500,000 people around here who don't know how to drive in snow). Luckily there were apparently not very many of these at the same time, so they were able to get to ours in a mere four hours.
Current forecast is for more snow, changing (finally!) to rain sometime this weekend with next week to be consistently above freezing. We'll see how that goes.
Update (8:41pm PST): ... down and up again. Save early and often, I guess.
Raining now. Of course, I've just been reminded that when you have rain falling on top of heavy accumulations of snow on top of not-entirely-sturdy structures like decks and carports, said structures tend to collapse. And maybe knock over power poles.
And so the fun continues
