Wow, thanks for all the input. In response to a few questions...

Artificial Light Needs: I'm not a morning person, so I'd say we used lights from maybe 5 or 5:30 pm to about 1 am. That's about 8 hours per day. After tripping on something the first night, I also left one tube of the flourescent light on in the corner throughout the night so I wouldn't have to fumble for a flashlight if I woke up in the dark and decided to use the bathroom.

Lesson Learned #12 Keep things clean, especially the floor
It's not like I was that busy, but I let things accumulate and had a big clean-up once power came back. Extra blankets, clothes, used batteries are all trip hazzards, too, and I had no excuse but laziness.

Specific Flashlights: One is an old Inova, no longer available (not sure which model), but I'm sure they have similar models now. The other was a limited production run that a guy on the candle power forums had made. I picked up two and think they're great, but don't know the manufacturer - or even if one was ever identified. They're not as fancy or tough as the stuff from HDS, for example, (which also have variable output) but I love the fact that I have a nice bright 42 lumen flashlight (lasts only 1-2 hours at that output, if I recall correctly) AND a lower output light, suitable for other uses such as use indoors, reading (with much longer battery life at lower output) - all in one light. I can't recall specifics, but I think there are about 20 steps, each cutting the output by 20% or something, so 42 lumens, 34, 27, 22, 18, 15, 12, 9, 7, 5, etc. There are many situations in which just a small amount of light is just fine.

I can be a bit of a gear geek at times - although I always try to focus on features I'll actually use. I read a bit on the Candle Power Forums and flashlightreviews.com before selecting this light. (Sadly, not before selecting that headlamp I complained about previously.)

I've been looking into Petzl and Fenix, but had felt like I'd spent enough on gear for a while. I'll look again and maybe pick one up.

Lesson Learned #13 A GPS device can help in (mildly) surprising ways
At least it was surprising to me. After abandoning my car due to virtually no gas and getting a ride home on the first day of power outage, the traffic in Bellevue was a mess. We tried to be clever and take a street called West Lake Sammamish down to I 90. This is a lakeside street with virtually no stop signs or lights, and thus less likely to be impacted by the power outage than the other major streets we'd driven through early with no-traffic-light=four-way-stop every block. Essentially, this would have worked fairly well, except for the fact that, well, we'd just had a wind storm so trees were down across the road every half mile.

Now, directions from the GPS weren't helpful because it just kept trying to route us back to the main roads we wanted to avoid. And we didn't really want to explore - many of the side streets there are isolated neighborhoods that just feed out onto that road, and those that have exits are a suburban maze. But I was able to use the GPS with it's handy zoom and drag features to browse the surrounding area and identify a way to turn off of - and come back to - the street we wanted to take. After 3 detours for downed trees we were about ready to give up, but had made a lot of progress. We stuck with it and made it through. I'm sure we saved at least 30 minutes (and more importantly, perhaps, saved that gas) by avoiding the main roads.

Fridge: I didn't worry about it much in the first 24 hours. I didn't check the temp, but I doubt our fridge had gotten too warm in 6 hours - it's new, and I keep it at 33-35. I know lots of people who seem to keep theirs at 40, but I like cold drinks!

Later, since I'd been paying a lot of attention to temperatures, it was 38-42 outdoors for the most part, which was better than indoors that day, so I moved some things out. After 48 hours, it was 41 inside, and maybe a few degrees cooler outside, so I went back to not worrying much about it.

It was also clear at this point that Seattle had power and the east side was slowly regaining it, so I wasn't going to go hungry. I would have worried more about the freezer, but we had almost nothing in it. Eventually I'll get a chest freezer and stock it, but I don't know how long one would stay cold without power. You'd think it wouldn't be too expensive to for the makers to insulate one of those as good as a cooler.

Water Pressure Excellent point! I'd completely forgotten. We normally have fairly high water pressure here. For the first 48 hours or so I didn't notice any change, then we started to see it decrease, and it was much lower by day 5. I assume that electric pumps are somewhere "up stream" and that they weren't working. Had there been some sort of real disaster or prolonged outage, I suppose we might have ended up without water.

Scanners - thanks for the info.

Benjammin - thanks for the many interesting points

[color:"blue"]WallyWorld[/color] - is this a real place? Perhaps an abbreviation - er, lengthening - of Wal-Mart that I haven't heard before?

Lesson #14 Bad Luck and [color:"red"] Evil Social Engineering[/color]
I know of one person who was without power much longer than we were. Their neighborhood was restored, but there was an additional tree down that prevented the newly restored power from reaching 3 homes. When 70,000-ish people are still without power after a week, the power company has got to prioritize and issues affecting a handful of people are going to be lower on the list. This could have been any one of us.

During the conversation in which I heard this story, I also heard another story. I was shocked to later hear someone else say they'd done the same thing. I want to be very clear that I do not support this, nor advocate it - but I think it's worth reporting what some people are doing.

What these people had done was falsely report live downed power lines in their neighborhood. They were tired of not having power, and tired of the automated phone system the power company had put in place to prevent having to try to deal in-person with thousands of phone calls. Once these people found a back door to get to a real person at the power company, or once the volume of calls was reduced to the point the power company could start handling them again, these people called in, identified where the tree had taken out their line, and claimed the line was live. One of them said, "Well, I said it MIGHT be live."

Live power lines are obviously very dangerous - at least one person was killed stepping on one covered by storm debris in the aftermath of this storm - and I have no problem with someone legitimately reporting a line they believe to be live. But these people were essentially lying in order to get their area bumped up on the "fix list." The power company needs accurate information to prioritize their work correctly. What if another area with a REAL live downed line had to wait longer because of this? I found it troubling that some people valued their convenience so highly, and other people so little.

Thanks,