Fun and games in our local community

I was in town today and heading back at 4:00PM, the clouds over the mountains were pitch black. It got really blustery and rained. I head further home and the Puget Sound Electric truck has part of the Mt. Baker highway blocked off and one of the high-wires is down (the 14.4KV feeders to the East County) The Kendall Valley Road was closed so they were routing people around that. I continued to head home and noticed that none of the homes were displaying any sort of electrical activity. The lights at the local substation five miles from me were out and a couple guys were there scratching their heads. It turns out that we had quite the supercell. The weather was overcast but dry and then all of a sudden, the winds picked up (my weather station recorded a couple gusts of 65MPH) and we had hail and rain. Trees were knocked down and the power went off around 4:30PM. I stayed at the store to help run it (cash sales only, nothing from the coolers or freezers -- we did sell a LOT of beer! Closed the store at 8:00PM and came home to fire up the generator. I had upgraded generators a year ago and recently sold the old unit. I failed to check to see what the connection was. Suffice to say that a NEMA L14-20 plug will not fit into an L14-30 socket. DERP! I ran extension cords to the freezers and spent the next couple hours finishing Joseph Kanon's excellent Istanbul Passage. John le Carr� on steroids -- the guy puts out a new novel every couple of years and they just keep getting better and better. Everything just bleeped a few minutes ago so I went and shut down the generator and am back online -- six hours without power. The PSE Engineers are wonderful -- they are fast to respond when stuff like this happens. Seldom am I without power for more than a couple hours even with such widespread damage as we had in our community.