Last night I charged our spare power banks, and our phones & laptops will be plugged in whenever they can be today.

2/n

#icyOttawa

I also have just charged a little emergency radio that also works as a flashlight. Cute little gizmo only about $20 five years ago.

3/n

#icyOttawa

Turned the thermostat up a notch, and we'll dress lightly today indoors.

The idea is to load up all of our house's thermal mass so if/when power goes off, it takes a bit longer for the house to cool off. We'll bundle up and pull out the blankets after the event.

4/n

#icyOttawa

I filled up the car's gas tank. Don't anticipate going anywhere, but one never knows.

Also I found a tiny fuel-efficient car worked well as a power source for our 1500W inverter we bought in the 2004(?) power outage.

The car sips fuel idling, barely showing a depletion, and kept our fridge and freezer working.

This time it's winter, so cooling food is not such a risk.

5/n

#icyOttawa

I'm filling a big thermos jug and insulated travel mugs with hot water/tea when the rain starts.

I can boil water later with a camping stove on the back deck if I need to, but a thermos supply will keep us going through a short outage.

6/n

I'm making soup. Was planning to start a turkey soup with xmas-turkey parts today anyway, but that'll be an easy meal if power is out tomorrow.

7/n

#icyOttawa

I fetched some logs, cleaned out the fireplace, and pre-built a fire ready to go. If we wake up to a cold house, that'll be handy. An option we didn't have in our old house, so a valued resource (although environmentally nasty one, used rarely).

8/n

#icyOttawa

I've done the strange thing of adding some snow to a strip along our walkway.

If you've lived with an ice storm before you've found that walking on crusty icy snow is easier than a glassy hard surface.

9/n

#icyOttawa

Storm chips.

As our brethren in #Halifax have taught us, having chips on hand is an important thing when you're couch-bound under a blanket. We're prepared.

10/n

#icyOttawa #stormChips

Oh, salt and sand. Almost forgot that I haven't brought that out of the garage for the winter yet. I'd better move that near our front door for use tomorrow.

11/n

#IcyOttawa

Dishwasher!

As @human3500 mentions, running your dishwasher now makes good sense, so you're not both without power and without clean dishes and having to heat water to wash them by hand.

12/n

#IcyOttawa

Use the Great Free Freezer!

I've put a few large containers 3/4 full of water outside. At -8°C they should freeze up solid, and if power goes off I can use the ice blocks to keep the fridge cold.

Ultimately I'd move perishable contents outside to stay cold, but initially ice blocks should do the trick for a day or so.

13/n

#icyOttawa

Food leftovers storage? Do it now.

If, like me, you have leftover Christmas food you've been grazing on for three days, now is a good time to get the remainders into the freezer.

If that was the plan anyway, get it done now. If there's a power outage, it'll be difficult, and you won't have to face eating yet more of the same, in the dark, to avoid its spoilage.

14/n

#icyOttawa

I this is amusing but midsleading. A perfectly functional system can have much technical debt. A house with hole in the roof is not perfectly functional.

Technical debt is about underlying complexity, brittleness, and (usually) inadequate documentation. It makes change hard and dangerous, rather than a system not actually working.

@njr I will absolutely agree providing you're defining 'system' as everything that provides a service to the end user - including both software and support.

If someone lives in a house with a hole in the roof, but every time it rains a roofer climbs up and keeps a tarpaulin nailed down the infrastructure is still broken, but the system as a whole continues to deliver the desired result.

It is, as you say, hard and dangerous as it's very easy to come close to breaking the system.