2003-09-22 - 2:22 p.m.

Marine pump - $14

12 volt battery - $16

Various electrical bits and pieces - $30

5 gallon pail - $2.50

Remembering that DC power is safe to use around water, and therefore being able to rig up a running pump for a halfway reasonable shower...priceless

Somehow, I doubt Mastercard is interested...especially seeing as how our debit card is a Visa...

(One for the electrical Engineers out there....how long will a marine pump rated at 1.2 Amps run off of a standard 12 volt battery? I know there's a formula, but I can't find it...and I'm not sure I have enough information either...so we'll throw it out to the crowd for comments....comments?)

So...you know how they say that "we'll have all but 20 or 30 customers back on within 7 days or so, but those last few may be as long as 14 or 21 days" whenever you ask Virginia Power about how long an outage is going to be? Well, this time the roulette ball landed on Vaughan Road, Petersburg Virginia.

If we're lucky, we'll have power by October.

Fortunately, we found a generator, which is running along very nicely at the moment. Unfortunately, it only puts out 110 Volt AC, and our well pump is 220 AC.

Somehow, I suspect some electrical dude could figure out a way to make 110 into 220, but that's above me.

Found out that you *can* buy well pumps that run on 110 rather than 220. That may well be the plan for the Afteraction "How can we make this not quite so annoying next time around?" spending. We'll see, I guess.

Fortuantely, Dinwiddie County has set up a water distribution point, so we can fill up every single container we can put our hands on with water...which means the toilets will flush.

I am mildly concerned about our septic system...see...there's a holding tank which is supposed to pump over into the real septic tank...but without electricity, said pumping doesn't happen...so I wonder what happens to the water we dump into the holding tank...for that matter...how big *is* the holding tank, and will it leech into the soil at least a little bit?

Ahh, the joys of being a rural homeowner...there really don't seem to be any books on "Septic Systems for Dummies"...Wow, I think I've figured out how to make my first million...

Knight of the Heart this weekend, we're about as ready as we're going to be. I need to polish a few tokens, and Rhi needs to finish off some weaving, but that's about it.

Probably back to work tomorrow. Most of the workplace is back to work, but our building wasn't suitable for work today, so we were still "Code Red", which means I don't go in. Have some work to do at home, thankfully.

OKay, time to see about the next project. Laters.

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