A weather update from The Farm Weather Center (TFWC).

It’s raining, thundering, and lighteninging. There have been 203 lightening strikes today. I find that hard to believe, too. But then, Windy is click-click-clicking away in the background, and there was a lot of thunder. (I’m convinced it picks up cloud-to-cloud strikes as well as cloud-to-ground.)

More to come.

A lesson from The Department of Redundancy Department (DoRD), where I am a full professor.

But first, remember the little dust up from back in the earlier days of blogging when some Perfect Moms of the Mommy Blogs finally fessed up and admitted that they sometimes screamed at their kids in front of the kids’ friends, served frozen pizza for supper, washed dry clean only clothes, and cursed out loud when their husbands watched football instead of steaming the draperies? They had to publicly apologize for not being perfect.

Such is not the case here at Bigfoodetc. I make mistakes, I procrastinate, I am not perfect. This was ever so obvious this morning when the power went out.

Mr. Big Food had just brought me my first cup of coffee before the sun came up, and we were chatting about the week’s menu. Silence. (That’s how you tell there’s no power.)

The first thing I did was call power company emergency number #1 from the kitchen landline phone. (No need to waste phone battery power.) No answer; left a message, called emergency number #2 and woke the guy up. Next, poured the pot of coffee into a thermos. (We have multiple ways of making coffee without store-bought power, but no need to waste a fresh pot of coffee.) Refilled my cup, returned to the den and positioned a large flashlight on my desk properly pointing at the ceiling so as to illuminate the whole room.

That’s when things started to fall apart.

Apparently for weeks I have had the ‘power source’ button on the weather radio set to ‘solar/crank’ (for the NiMH rechargeable battery). Every single time the national weather service wanted to get my attention– probably a dozen or more times yesterday alone– it drained the battery just a little bit until overnight some time, it ran out of juice. The DoRD bright side is that just inches away from the radio there are three battery packs and an assortment of USB cords. Turn energy source to ‘adaptor,’ plug in cord. Good to go.

Never should have happened, but I recovered because the radio is massively redundant.

The same cannot– and I am ever so sorry to say this because I love Atlas– be said of the high definition Atlas indoor monitor. And to make matters worse, I have known this since the beginning of our relationship– even before I invited it to come live with us. It is a point of shame that I– full professor in the DoRD– did not take action sooner. I was displeased with myself for hours.

The outdoor unit runs on solar and backup batteries. No hard wires. If it cannot successfully transmit to the monitor, it stores the data for later transmission.

The monitor runs on alternating current electricity. That’s it. I have looked into this multiple times. Electricity from somewhere inside the wall, through a two pronged plug, up a wire and into the gizmo through a round pin. A round pin like a earbud pin. Poor design if you ask me. How hard would it have been to make the cord and plug like most cellphones set ups? plug. big usb. cord. little usb.

Fortunately, I had installed a SD card so no data would be lost. But what good is a personal weather station that doesn’t function when the power goes out in bad weather?

Weighs three pounds. Charges while it is being charged. Has AC plus earbud sized pin + 3-prong + something having to do with a car plug in. Perfectly redundant. Perfect.

Just as soon as I save up some egg money.