Thank someone or something for relatively short power outages

I wasn't far off in my guess about how long the power would be out here once it went out yesterday.  As soon as the power flipped off my mind raced to the severe thunderstorm warnings notice that had just flashed across the TV screen minutes before and I pretty much assumed that the power wasn't going to be coming back too quickly.[more]

Sure 'nuff, approximately 12 hours passed before the power was back online, and even then (at approx. 4am by old time standards, 5am by the newly sprung forward standard) the power didn't stay on too long.  Just an hour passed before I heard the roar and felt the vibration of the generator that the next door neighbor has.

Thankfully I learned a very valuable lesson last year, back when the ice storms hit this area and we were without power for approx. 5 days, the lesson of where the over-limit sensor is for our furnace.  As expected, when the power went out after that one hour of return the furnace was running trying to heat the place up and it continued to burn until the over-limit sensor kicked off and killed the fuel to the fire.  When power returned I reached back gingerly, found the right button and had to depress it to get the furnace to operate normally again.

Thank the gods of your own choosing that the people that designed and built the furnance included safety features such as that over-limit sensor.  Without it the furnance would just sit burning with no forced air around it, eventually overheating and potentially causing the entire home to burn down.

Also thank the same gods that I learned where that switch was last year after an expensive service call for the technician to come out and reset it.  While I wasn't happy about the bill for the service call, I did appreciate the lesson and knew what to do this year, even knew to expect the problem.

Now that power is back to normal, I can sit and wait for the NASCAR race to come on later and possibly even get around to watching the movie that I had set aside to watch last night (Beowulf on HD DVD, purchased when it was released, but still haven't found time to watch it.  Supposed to be gorgeous, but had other movies I had rented stacked up, so I've put off watching it until later...)

Speaking of movies, the Mrs. and I sat and watched Michael Clayton.  Much, much, much better than I expected.  I'm a sucker for legal thriller type movies and love Grisham books and the like, but on the other hand George Clooney has gotten 'old' for me, his political activism and know-it-all-ism is a bit much to stomach and I wasn't sure I could deal with him as the lead character in the movie.  I shouldn't have been so concerned, the movie was excellent and well worth the time to watch.

One other movie to mention, but only as one folks would probably be best to avoid unless they had to watch it, The Assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford.  Bleh.  Long, long, long and very boring for the most part.  If you are a true fan of western movies or an historian you might enjoy it, but at nearly 3 hours in lenght and with the first 2 plus of that time spent ambling around, it just wasn't as good as I would have hoped.

Hope everyone has a great Sunday and a great week.  'til next time.