From an undisclosed location&#8230;
<p>The title was a joke.  The rest of this is not.</p>
<p>Cathy Raymond and I evacuated from our home this morning. We&#8217;ve never had to do that before.</p>
<p>Storm Nika has totally messed over the five-county area around Philadelphia. I&#8217;ve seen more downed power lines today than in my entire life until yesterday.  Many roads are blocked by fallen trees.  Over 600,000 people are without power; PECO has declared an all-hands emergency but says even so service may not be fully restored until the weekend.</p>
<p>This is much, much worse than Hurricane Sandy was. Regional rail is shut down.  Most businesses are closed. So many homes are becoming uninhabitable that the county is setting up emergency shelters in schools.</p>
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<p>Nominally it&#8217;s around 32F with little wind-chill but the freezing rain (now stopped, but could resume) soaks through clothes rapidly and I had minor cold burns around my ankles this morning from (unavoidably) walking through deep slush.</p>
<p>You would not want to be caught outside in this, hypothermia could  sneak up on you and kill you much faster than is obvious. I felt it coming on a little when I was helping clear fallen trees from a friend&#8217;s driveway; fortunately, I could limit my exposure.</p>
<p>Temperatures are supposed to drop ten degrees tonight.  As wet at it is now, that&#8217;ll turn a lot of roads into glare ice.</p>
<p>We&#8217;re OK.  We were on the ball enough to nail down a hotel room a couple of hours before most people figured out they ought to. It&#8217;s only a couple of minutes from home; we can easily retrieve anything we need, it&#8217;s just not safe to try to live there yet.</p>
<p>We check on the house occasionally.  Damage from treefalls is a minor but not insignificant concern.  Also Sugar is still there; while she&#8217;s nicely demonstrating that all that cat fur is not purely decorative, Cathy worries.</p>
<p>Dammit, this year I am going to install a generator at the house.  One instance of having to bug out is enough&#8230;and given the Maunder-Minimum-like trend in solar activity there&#8217;s probably more of this coming, not less.  Hey, all you AGW idiots?  It would be nice if we could actually have some global warming&#8230;?</p>
