What you gonna do when you get there?

2006-12-20 - 7:21 p.m.

As you may have heard, we had a big wind storm here in the Pacific Northwest last Thursday night. Despite the fact that the meteorologists had been warning about for at least a day ahead of time, it still caught a lot of people off guard. Lolo and I were prepared, though. We had our flashlights ready and set a back up alarm on Lolo's cell phone to wake us up in the morning. The wind blew all night long, whipping the plastic around my building noisily and the workers who were called in in the middle of the night to secure it were none too quiet either. We didn't get much sleep that night before our alarm went off at 4am. The power went out about forty minutes after we got up, fifteen minutes before we left for work.

We caught the bus to work and made it there with no difficulty. But we had a ton of sick calls at work. One pharmacist, five (of six) technicians, and all of our managers called in sick. Since I was extra that day (I was there to work on scheduling the technicians), I ended up doing technician work--which of course I've never actually been trained to do. It made for an interesting Friday.

We left work at 2, caught the bus home where the power was still out, did our last minute packing and caught the bus outside our apartment at about 4. It took us two and a half hours to get to the airport due to traffic signals being out and people all trying to get out of the city to somewhere with heat and cooked food. The lines for gas stations were blocks long. We arrived at the airport an hour later than planned, but still plenty early for our flight--especially consider that the power was out at the control tower, too, and no flights were taking off. We arrived in Sacramento at around 11pm that night and then waited for my brother and sister-in-law's also delayed flights to arrive. It was a long day.

On Saturday we had Christmas Eve--we wrapped presents and cooked (and ate) a Christmas dinner. On Sunday we celebrated Christmas. We got up early, baked scones, opened presents, played games, had cheese fondue for dinner. On Monday we went visiting. We drove down to Stockton to visit my aunt and cousin and grandfather and then Lolo and I went to visit with my college friends, Deenpo, Doodle, and Tigger. Then Tuesday we came back here. Very busy. Lots of fun, very little sleep.

When we got home, the power was back on in our apartment. We had left most of the light switches on and the TV was on. Oops. We didn't know how long the power had been out, but it was long enough that we decided to throw out everything in the fridge. Work today and then back home and grocery shopping. That's all I've been up to.

I have a question for you Firefox users. You know how you can press alt+tab to switch between windows? Is there a similar keyboard shortcut to switch between tabs in Firefox? I use that all the time and I find it annoying to actually have to take my fingers off the keys to switch to a different tab.