Thunderstorms in January are an odd thing. It shouldn’t be pouring down rain and thundering and lightning-ing when it’s 35 degrees out. If the rain turns to snow, I’m turning on Lewis Black.[1] The storms are making the power in the house flicker. This is the second time in as many days I’ve had power problems.

Yesterday morning, around 8am, I woke up to a BOOM, then a click, and then silence. I don’t know what happened, but it took all the power away. I figured it was just a momentary thing. If I laid in bed long enough, the power would come back on, and I could snooze the radio again and sleep a little longer. But it didn’t come back on. And the UPS in the other room’s beeping was more annoying than the alarm clock, so I got up to check things out.

It’s sad that the one day I get up early for work, and have time for coffee, I can’t make it because there’s no power.[2]

So, I scraped together as many candles as I could, and showered by candle light. That’s really odd. Can’t say I’ve done that before. I got cleaned up pretty quickly and was on my way to work in no time — the house is boring without electricity. As I was leaving the driveway (after manually raising the garage door, then going back through the house, struggling to get it to shut all the way, yadda yadda) I saw an AmerenIP truck nearby. I guess they noticed. When I got home that evening, I learned the power had been out for about 5 hours before it turned back on. Too bad it couldn’t have silently gone out; I could have used the extra hours of sleep.

The grad school application stuff is going in the mail tomorrow. Wish me luck.

The Illini are still playing well. We play tomorrow night at Assembly Hall and try to continue our 16-and-oh run. ESPN tonight was going on and on about how the Illini are coming to Wisconsin later this month, and Dukie V has penciled it “Upset City.” I really wish he wasn’t calling that game — he can be such a blowhole when he’s not stroking his beloved ACC. I agree the Illini will need all their wits about them. Wisconsin has the longest winning streak at home (37 games as of tonight.) Let’s try to end that.

I’m behind on reading on all the good things to come out of CES. I wish I could have gone; maybe next year. I did see Apple released their flash-based iPod today. I only need one more referral to get a TiVo iPod, and I’m close to getting that. I would still consider getting the Shuffle iPod, if Cstores is selling them at a discount. I’m better off putting my money into a new desktop at home so I can play with TiVoToGo, whenever I finally get it.

[1] BTW, Matt told me the big angry man is touring and coming to STL and CHI in the coming weeks. Anyone want to go?

[2] Bonus points to you if you thought of running the coffee maker off the UPS. I didn’t realize that at the time, but I had just woken up.