A big storm went through the area last night. For a while the winds were up to 35-40 MPH. Gave us a good taste of hurricane season! At about 7 last night the lights started to dim, and then went out altogether at 8:30. They have been out all night and morning, just coming on a few minutes ago (1:30 PM)…17 hours altogether. I think that’s the second longest outage we’ve had so far.

Power has been pretty spotty as of late, probably 4 brownouts this week alone. Enough power to run the lights, but it kills the fridge and electronics / tvs. Luckily, most of the small electronics work during the brownouts, since they can use anything from 100 to 240 volts. If you live down here you need a generator, at least to run the fridge–it will pay for itself after about 3 extended outages (saving a freezer worth of meat).

It’s pretty gloomy here today, and unusually “cold”–meaning the mid 60′s–but that’s pretty darn cold when it’s usually 85 degrees. Ev’s Mom & Dad have their jackets on and Ev is in a sweater. If we were in Chicago right now we’d probably be in shorts and sandals.

We had a pretty busy week. Monday was Ponce. Tuesday was pretty much a rest day (I did some smoked pork on the BBQ). On Wednesday we drove over to Florida, a town toward the middle of the island. Every year they have big 24 hour endurance mountain biking race, and we were looking to find the trails. After some driving around, we found them. If the weather clears up later this week, we might take our bikes down there. Kinda a long haul, but the trails looked well marked and had varying difficulties.

On Thursday and Friday we went over to TJ Ranch (near Utuado–about an hour drive away). Evelyn did her Book Club event on Thursday, while I worked on some electrical stuff (replacing some lights in the cabins). Then on Friday we went back so that I could finish up (moving the pool lights). It was nice to hang out there, and do some productive work.

Today we’re just staying out of the “cold” and I’m relaxing after a lot of driving this week.