Thanks, Jeff, yes it was a HUGE storm, at one point half a million people were without electricity. My power went out at 6 a.m. Friday and did not come on again until noon on Wednesday. One of my neighbors STILL doesn't have power. Yikes!

Here I thought I was pretty prepared for this kind of thing..... but I found out, I was not as prepared as I should be. I HIGHLY recommend that everyone have at least 4 LED lanterns, and lots of batteries. I had lots of batteries (but didn't need many, those LED's are wicked efficient) -- but one of my lanterns failed so I only had 2 that worked. Not enough to make it comfortable without electric power for lights. Gack.

Also: if you have room in your freezer, it is a REALLY good idea to fill up some pretty good sized plastic containers with water, and make some blocks of ice. Ice ran out fast here. I threw away about a hundred bucks worth of food but most people lost a lot more than that. Fortunately I was pretty low on food but when I saw there were severe thunderstorms expected, I didn't stock up..... whew!

And, I didn't have any kind of a camp stove or anything like that to heat water on. You'd be surprised the difference it makes just to be able to have coffee.... Anybody got a recommendation for a good small heating unit of some kind?