A nasty storm came through the Chicago area on Monday morning and just under 900,000 people lost power. The power returned slowly over several days, but unfortunately I live in a small neighborhood. Two of the houses got power back in three days, but seven of the houses - myself included - didn't get power back until the sixth day.

We learned a lot.

We have well water, and that was by far the biggest issue in three ways:

1. Toilets
2. Cleanup - showers
3. Horses - we have three, and they drink 15-20 gallons/day

We have an above ground pool, and this was a Godsend. We hauled 5 gallon buckets of water from the pool to flush toilets, but because we also have a sewer lift pump we had to be careful and watch the level in the lift tank. After six days the level rose, but not to the point of concern.

We also used the pool for cleanup. We spent a lot of effort skimming debris out of the pool each time to try to keep it as clean as possible. Swimming was sufficient to clean our bodies, but we found we needed to shampoo hair along side the pool - it worked. By day six the pool was getting cloudy, but clean (kept the chlorine tablet dispenser floating). Not sure if we could have gone much longer than six or seven days there.

Water for the horses was a huge issue. They drink a LOT of water. We had two 100 gallon troughs and two 50 gallon metal troughs. Luckily our township offered to truck water in for the horses. Our second option would have been to call the local fire department. People have a soft spot for horses.

Drinking water wasn't an issue - we just bought bottled water.

We ate out more than we normally would, but it was kind of fun. Our family did spend more time together. We tended to gather in the family room with the light of my son's Coleman LED lantern.

Eventually we would have had to take a trip to do laundry.

Most people around here joked that it was basically like camping.

The refrigerator and freezer contents were doomed after day two. We honestly didn't have a ton of food we were worried about and saw it as a good excuse to throw out old frozen food, though we bought milk on Sunday and had to throw much of that out. We used this as an opportunity to give both a nice thorough cleaning (using pool water).

The other thing that was an issue was that even though we opened up windows by night and closed up by day to try to keep the house cool, the house tended to hold heat in the upper floors. If we had a generator it would have been nice to be able to power a whole-house fan to suck out the hot air.

Things we didn't miss: lights (electric lanterns and headlamps did fine), TV (obvious), land-line telephone, recreational internet (we had it on my phone and at work). BTW, the internet WAS important to be able to view status and to contact local government folks to make sure we didn't get forgotten.

Mid-way I bought a generator (they were hard to find), but the thing we really wanted to power was the water pump, and to do that would have needed to do some hard wiring. In the end I only used it to pump out the septic tank. I am currently doing the planning to install a transfer switch so I can power water and other selected items using the generator.

By the way, we have a seasonal camp site in northern Wisconsin - about 5 hours drive, and might have just headed up there, but without running water for the horses that simply wasn't an option - we couldn't have asked a horse-sitter to deal with that.