We had a major wind and rain storm here on Thursday night, that knocked out power all over Wetern Washington and Oregon.
Here at home in Woodinville, about 7 miles NE of the Microsoft campus, power went out at about 11PM, after threatening to for at least an hour.
Now unfortunately for me, I had homework to do. At work, we’d spent the week doing a big planning exercise for new stuff we might like to build for Windows Live. We had some excellent presentations early in the week, brainstorming in the middle, and we were to all present our work on Friday. Well, I still had to finish writing up our idea when the power went out. I had about 2 hours of battery left on the laptop, and I’d made sure my PDA was charged so I could get online and send my materials out. I managed to finish with only minutes to spare, and even then, I had to transfer the files to the PDA to actually get then sent, since the Internet connection over BT DUN was just too slow. In the meantime I could hear branches falling all over the place, howling winds, and two trees falling within a few hundred feet of our house — much too close for comfort.
Then, Fri morning I tried to go to work. Whoops. Power was out all the way into Redmond, and across the entire East Side as far as I could tell. Needless to say, I didn’t get to do my presentation. Later…
I did get some pictures of some of the damage around the house on the way home. I’ll upload them later, once my power is back and I have some real bandwidth. For now, you’ll have to settle for this textual account of events, thumbed out on my PDA’s sghtly-nicer-than-average chicklet keyboard. 
Glad to hear that you’re OK. I wondered if you might be stuck in that storm area and power outage. How’s life at Microsoft? I’ve changed jobs since you and I last talked and am working for a Cisco network engineering company. They don’t blog, but I’m working on that. We just deployed a Project and Sharepoint server and it’s amazing! Write more, I miss hearing about your music…
Thanks for the note, Steve. It’s pretty bad there — not “Katrina” bad, but bad enough that we’ve escaped to Vancouver for at least the next few days.
Microsoft is going really well. Of course there are all those BigCo things to deal with, as well as the MSFT specific ones, but all in all, it’s been very pleasant so far. The folks I work with are smart, hard-working, creative and relatively easy to work with on average.
I’m not doing much music since moving, so that’s why you haven’t heard much about it. I played s pick-up gig with some old friends a few weeks ago, but nothing to blog home about. There’s just too much going on these days to make time — perhaps after Gabe is born… um… after he’s a year or so.