It's fairly common that we take for granted how available and helpful heat is. We're sitting in our townhouse right now, heavily bundled against the low-40-degree temperature. It's cold. And it's certainly not the kind of thing I would have expected, say, last week.
So far, we've been heating water on the grill outside—as it's really the only cooking implement we've got that doesn't require power. Keeping warm at night has required massive piles of blankets (which worked fairly well) and during the daytime we often alternate between being bundled in the house and being warmed up in the car.
Which brings me to my next point: resource shortages. When the power first went out, Layla and I considered heading out to buy gas for the car and a few staples to keep us from going hungry. It turns out that nearly everyone else had the same idea, and what few gas stations were actually open have been mobbed. We actually put getting fuel off until yesterday, when I spent nearly 45 minutes in line for 3/4 tank of Chevron regular. Hoorah.
Even better has been the search for firewood. It turns out that most major grocery stores (the vast majority of which have been operating off of emergency power to run a smattering of lights and yes, you guessed it, the credit card machines) have actually had a decent supply of easy-light and traditional firewood in stock up until Saturday morning or so. I think that once people had spent a night in the cold, they went searching for wood in droves, and it's now completely impossible to find—even 30 miles away where power has been restored.
"Well," you might say, "why don't you just use some of the fallen trees as firewood?" And I would, except that I don't happen to have an axe, and that wood will take a few days to dry out before it's actually, you know, flammable.
Bummer.
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