I woke up this morning to the sound of loud beeping coming from the two battery backups in my downstairs office. I looked over at the alarm clock to see what time it was, but it was dark. I rolled out of bed, found the Maglite I keep in my night stand and stumbled down the stairs. I shut down the computer, turned off the battery backups to stop the beeping and called the power company’s outage reporting hotline. It was 4:00am.

I headed back to bed and set the alarm clock on my cell phone so that I wouldn’t sleep in if the power wasn’t back on by my wake-up time. It wasn’t really necessary since I couldn’t fall back asleep anyways.

The power still wasn’t on when I got up, so I had to get ready in the dark, which was a lot easier than I thought it would be. The only thing that was a pain was getting the Jeep out of the garage. The garage door didn’t want to stay open, so I had to tie it up while I backed out.

According to the time on the clocks when I got home from work, the power came back on around 10:00am. I have no idea why it went out in the first place since it wasn’t raining or windy, but I’m glad to have it back!

The temperature plummeted today from the 80s to the low 50s. The gray skies, rain and choppy waters on Lake Erie made it look like winter was returning.

When I got home tonight I dug into my closet and found one of my OU hoodies. It’s always nice to throw on a hoodie and cuddle up with a blanket on the couch when it’s cold out. A cup of hot chocolate also sounds really good right about now.

Apple today rolled out their updated MacBook Pros. I’ve been keeping an eye on the MBP since I plan on upgrading my laptop when Apple releases OS X Leopard in October.

Right now I’m using my four year old HP laptop as my primary computer and a six year old iBook as a secondary computer. I’ve been planning to consolidate them for some time, but Apple pushed the Leopard launch back from June to October, so I’ve still got four more months of waiting.

I think I might head out to the Apple Store this weekend to check out the new LED displays on the MBPs and see how they compare to the current monitors. According to Apple they look the same, but improve the battery life, decrease the laptop’s weight and are more environmentally friendly.

If anyone runs out to the Apple Store and buys one of the updated laptops, leave a comment and let me know what you think.