Glad to hear everyone came through the storm relatively unscathed.

We were pretty fortunate, we only got a couple inches of rain, much less than was expected. We had alot of wind though, fortunately, no trees came down on our house although one of our neighbors wasn't as lucky. We lost power at 2am on Friday morning. It had flashed several times and we were ready for it, so I cranked up the generator and plugged in the sump pumps, frig and freezer. So we were pretty well set.
Cooked on the camping stove, and had lots of edibles that didn't require cooking. The only downside was that we didn't have water (our pump is hardwired and couldn't plug into the generator). We had thought ahead and stored plenty of drinking water in a large coolers as well as bottled water, and used stored rainwater to flush toilets. Our power came back on at 6pm on Friday, so we weren't down for too long, especially compared to some who may be out all week.

Lessons learned: Check your sump pumps before the day of the storm. When I was laying extension cords for the pumps Thursday morning, I noticed that one of my sumps was full of water. The switch had gone bad on the pump. Fortunately, a quick call to my plumber got me a new pump installed in under 2 hours. This definately saved me a flooded basement, but would have saved me some panicking if I had caught it Tuesday instead of the day of the storm.

My new generator worked great. Although we mainly got it to keep the sumps running and the basement dry, it was really nice to not have to worry about my fridge and freezer as well. We plan to get a hookup to the main house supply so that we can run the water pump as well.

I was glad I still have a small tv with rabbit ears. I almost got rid of it earlier this year because we never use it, but our cable went out as soon as the winds picked up, though we still had power for several hours. The tv was handy for checking the radar and getting weather reports, as was my wind up radio (Grundig). The cable was out for another day after the power came back as well.

Overall, it was not something I want to do everyday, but due to our preparations, it wasn't terribly inconvenient either. And you just can't beat a 4 day weekend.

Greg