ICEBOUND. Mike Munger has heard from Chris Lawrence.

I'm fine, except for being a little bit cold (I've been camping out in my office, which has heat but isn't all that comfortable). I just booked a hotel room for tonight in case my power isn't back - the power company's estimates for when power will be back are pretty much useless, although they said Friday that some customers might not have power for 5 days (i.e. until Wednesday).

At worst, about 1/2 million Ameren customers were without power; as of now, that's down to just under 400,000. In my zip code, the number of outages actually went up since Friday before finally coming down a little in the past couple of hours. What's most irritating is that there is power within 2 blocks of my apartment (there's a large shopping mall within 1/4 mile that briefly lost some of its power on Saturday, but the power company had them fixed very quickly), but for some reason they seemed to have skipped over my neighborhood.

St. Louis and environs got clobbered by the ice storm. Here in Flatland there's great powder, but no topography to speak of, and the heaviest snow bands missed Chestnut and some of the Wisconsin River ski runs.

(Where did I see that post about the power companies restoring power to the businesses and the richest as well as the poorest neighborhoods first because those are the customers most likely to raise hell?)