Further events:

About thirty minutes after I posted, it was lights out and electricity off: The power company threw the switch and shut off our area due to concerns over high winds damaging equipment and causing significant wildfire:

This is a practice which I heartily endorse, especially after a wildfire devastated our area a few years ago. Nevertheless, it is a major inconvenience. In our case, no light, heat or internet (hence, no ETS!!)

Not surprisingly, it was hard to get reliable, up to date information. Projected to last bout two hours at first, the lights finally came on 25 hours later, along with heat and running hot water.

Lessons learned:

It is good to have decent camping gear and to be familiar with it. You will probably be using it in low light conditions. Decent sleeping bags compensate for unheated dwellings.

Luci solar powered lanterns are real winners. I used several, and they provided even, soft light and they are fairly cheap. Also useful are good headlamps, used for task lighting. Current models have variable light levels, and we used lower levels most of the time, which helps with run time, which is critical.

Smart phones are absolutely critical. With no internet or TV, our phones were our best way to keep with events. much of our activity centered around using, or charging, our phones. It is hard to have too many power banks, or lights/power banks when the duration of the outage is indefinite.

It is useful to have food on hand which can be eaten with little or no prep. The most elaborate cooking I did was a four minute or so heating of water this morning for the indispensable cup of coffee. I used an iso-butane cartridge one burner stove, in preference to a two burner propane or alcohol stove for ease of use and quick results. The ability to cook in several ways is good!

A few weeks ago, I posted an inquiry about attachments that would shift electricity from large power tool batteries and recharge smaller devices. i followed the advice I received and all worked extremely well. Thanks a bunch to you all!

In many ways, this was a pretty good training exercise for something more major, like a big earthquake, where we might spend days camping out at home.