Growing Roots: Day 6

Yesterday I talked about selecting my theme for this year ( Theme for 2009: Growing Roots ).  Today I’m going to quickly share an example from my life of how selecting a theme like this affects my thinking, my goals and the action steps I take on a daily basis.

As you’ll recall from yesterday’s article, one of the areas of improvement I’ll be working on this year as part of my theme is “Home / Office Improvement and Organization”.  This is an area of my life which I haven’t really applied a lot of energy to in the past because I was focused on other things.  However, today I took some of the first steps towards improving this area of my life.

Power Outages

As some of you have probably noticed, my posting frequency in the last few weeks has diminished.  Of course part of that is a result of the holiday season and all the events and preparations associated with that, but actually a much larger reason for this has been related to the adverse weather conditions we’ve been experiencing here in Western Canada.

The amount of snowfall we’ve had here in the Greater Vancouver area of British Columbia has been absolutely insane.  I believe someone told me that it’s the most snow we’ve had in 50 years.  It seems like all it’s been doing is snowing for the last three weeks.

Now, compared to some other parts of the world, or even other parts of Canada, the amount of snow we have been getting is really insignificant compared to cities like Toronto or Winnipeg for example, but the thing is that we really don’t get this kind of weather in Vancouver and when we do, things go wrong.

Most of the time we just get a lot of rain in winter and maybe a few days of light snow.  This year we’ve been getting insane amounts of snow and nobody has been prepared for this.  In the area of Vancouver that I live around, there are a lot of tall trees.  The problem is that when it snows as heavily as it has been, the branches on the trees around this area get really weighed down with the snow.  Then, when the temperature fluctuates from below freezing levels to above freezing levels, and the snow turns to rain, the snow starts to get even heavier as it absorbs the moisture from the rain.  When that happens, branches and entire trees fall.

Near my area, a number of trees fell on December 26th and took out some power lines.  That caused our house to lose power for two days while the crews worked to fix the lines.  At first this wasn’t so bad, as my wife and I just started a fire in the fire place and relaxed by the open flame, unwinding from all the running around on Christmas.  It was fun for the first few hours, but later it just turned into a nuisance.

One of issues we have with the power being out is that we live on a property with well water.  Well water is great because it’s healthier and cleaner than the city water here in Vancouver (and probably most other cities), but the challenge is that when our power goes out, so does the electric pump that pumps the water, so with no power we also have no water.  That really sucks.

Secondly, we also have radiant heating which requires an electric water pump to circulate the hot water, so we also have no heating.  So, when the power goes out, the house gets cold.  That also sucks.  We have a fireplace which is great, but it doesn’t warm up the entire house in this kind of weather.  So basically, when the power is out we are stuck basically sitting around the fireplace doing nothing.

If the power went out for a few hours, once, it would be no big deal. I have no issues with making the best of that kind of situation.  However, when the power is out for 10 or 20 hours and longer, there are issues that arise that start to get quite annoying.  For example, all of the leftover food we had in the fridge from Christmas dinner had to be thrown out because of the power failure.  Then a week later, which was this past weekend, the power went out again due to the exact same sequence of events with a major snowfall, followed by a rapid increase in temperatures which caused more trees to fall.

This time it was also out for over 24hours, and finally we had the power restored yesterday evening.  What sucks about that is that we just finished buying new food for the fridge from the last failure, and now it went bad again.  Very annoying, and somewhat expensive.

I was also worried about my fish tanks during the failure as well, since the water heaters run on electricity to keep the water temperature in the right range.  When the power went out, my water temperature in the tanks dropped by 20 degrees Fahrenheit overnight, which the fish weren’t too happy about.  Luckily so far I haven’t had any casualties, but if it happens again there is no telling how many fish I could lose to temperature fluctuations like this.

Of course, on top of all this, since my income comes primarily from working from home using my computers and Internet, when the power goes out I can’t work either so that is why you’ve probably noticed a slowdown in posts for the last few weeks.  I’m still trying to catch up with emails.

Anyway, I don’t want to ramble on for too long about the power outages, but I just wanted to give you some background so that you could see how I’m implementing this year’s theme into my life.

Picking Up Supplies

Today, I decided to go out and take some preventative measures to organize some supplies in case further weather problems arise and we have another power failure.  I went out to Costco and picked up a backup power generator as well as some other smaller supplies related to power outages.

The power generator isn’t going to power my entire house, but it will provide us with some backup power to at least power our fridges and a few smaller appliances should the power go out again.  Eventually I plan on getting a fully wired standby generator system installed which can basically power the entire house when the power goes out, but for the time being I’m just going to use this smaller unit for now.

I also picked up these LED hockey puck type lights that are battery powered which you can easily mount pretty much anywhere and use them for light during a power outage.  They were really inexpensive actually and the box said that each light will last for up to 100 hours on a single set of batteries.  This is an excellent light substitute during a power outage if you don’t want to use a candle for example.  Let’s say that during a power outage you want to leave a light on in the bathroom throughout the night, without leaving a burning candle on when you go to sleep; these lights would work for that.

I might actually end up buying more of these if I like them.  I can already think of a few dozen uses for them.  Another thing I picked up was a carbon monoxide alarm with a battery backup system.  Now you might ask why would a person need a carbon monoxide alarm with a battery backup?  Well, mostly because backup generators produce carbon monoxide emissions which could be poisonous if the fumes from the generator were getting into your house when the power is out.  Normally most people have carbon monoxide monitors that work fine when the power is on, but when the power goes out they stop worki
ng.  It’s just an extra precaution, that’s all.

Another thing I picked up was a wind-up LED flashlight (no batteries needed) and a commercial grade fire extinguisher.  Now you might be thinking that I’m being a bit paranoid and going a bit overboard with all these supplies, but I live in a rural area surrounded by trees and when the power goes out our water pump doesn’t pump water, so I think a fire extinguisher is a no brainer.  Especially if the power goes out and backup generators, fire places and candles are involved.  It just makes sense to have fire extinguishers around. 

Actually I probably haven’t mentioned yet that our neighbor’s house caught fire a couple of days after Christmas after the first power failure.  Nobody got hurt, but they had a chimney fire in the attic and it really  made me think about the fact that I didn’t even have a fire extinguisher in the house.  It was added to my list of things to get that night.

Summary

So this is pretty much what I meant when I said that “Growing Roots” was my theme for this year.  In previous years I wouldn’t spend a lot of time or energy thinking about things like this, but this year I am.  It might not seem like getting prepared for possible adverse weather conditions is related to Making Money Doing What You Love, but the next time the power goes out I’ll at least be able to fire up the generator and write some articles, work on some affiliate campaigns, or if nothing else at least be able to read some eBooks or watch some DVD’s on my laptop instead of just staring at the fireplace for 12 hours straight.

Of course, now that I bought a generator, Murphy’s Law will kick in and the power probably won’t go out for another 50 years.

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