Okay, Amos, today I got up at 3:48 AM. Beat that. ;-)

I'll tell you why I did that. We had a vicious windstorm and blizzard here tonight and it knocked out the power around midnight. By about 3:30 I was lying there and beginning to wonder if the sump pump might be overflowing yet. I went downstairs with a flashlight and checked. It was just beginning to flood out onto the floor.

Okay, so out into the howling storm to start the generator (which hasn't been started for, oh, a year or two...

Well, lucky that I have a can of this stuff called "Liquid Fire" for starting balky engines. When you start something as seldom as this generator gets started, it's a bit tricky remembering where the various switches are (choke, on/off switch/line to power switch), specially when it's pitch black outside in a storm and you're trying to do it all by the light of a flashlight...however, I figured it out after a bit. (Now let's see if I still remember it all next time. Ha!) Between that and the Liquid Fire, I got the thing going.

Whew! So that got the sump pumps going and I averted the flood. By this time it was about 4:15. The main power came on again at around 4:45 and the wind is dying down gradually, with a forecast for tomorrow that looks like just moderate winds instead of a mini-hurricane. Good.

I think tonight's adventures are over. Since I didn't really get any sleep tonight, I figured, hell, why not crow over the fact that I got up EARLIER THAN AMOS!!!!!!! Oh yeah! ;-) (one has to find pleasure in small things, I figure)