It’s Monday again. We hope you have electricity. Saturday’s storm took out the power for thousands, and many homes were still juiceless Sunday afternoon. Our sympathies. It’s frustrating, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Everything electronic looks stupid, somehow – inert useless boxes waiting for the kiss of life. You give up on the freezer – the ice cream liquefies to glop; the frozen meat slumps; the shrimp turns to the dark side. The laptop runs down and the cellphone battery dries up. You have that strange unnerving reminder that modern life can be undone in a day. Two, tops.
Ah, but doesn’t this have its own rewards? This is how life used to be. The good old days before the battering clatter of TV and radio hammered our eardrums all day, when a family sat down at night for candle-powered magic-lantern shows instead of Xbox bloodfests, when Father read the Good Book by gaslight while Mother sewed in her rocking chair, frequently stabbing her finger because the light was low. But she had a callus. Kids today, they don’t know about low-light needle calluses. You sit on the porch, sipping a lime rickey – whatever that is is – savoring the last small slivers of ice, fanning yourself with a magazine, watching the neighbors pass on their nightly perambulations as the sun slides down and the world slowly lowers into the warm bath of night. You can’t help but think how simpler life was once, how easily the timeless rhythms of the day reassert themselves once the rude blare of the electrical bulb has been silenced, how so many things on which you thought you depended can be easily replaced.
Man, this stinks. Enough with the Our Town scenario. Make with the volts, mac.
An hour later the power comes back and everything in the house leaps to life – the air conditioner spools up, the appliances brighten and blink their twelves, begging to be reset; the TV yells and the computer reconnects to the vast ululating web.
Did you check buzz.mn to see if we’d finally gotten around to the great lawn-chair recall story? Sorry about that, chief. Check back around 10:30.
Power outages
Out here in the Seattle area, we had a major power outage last December, the result of an extended period of heavy rains (that caused major flooding in some areas, my brother had floodwater a block from his house) followed by a windstorm that took down thousands of trees. My parents had a tree go down in their yard, but fortunately it fell away from the house (other people weren't so lucky.) We were also lucky that our power was only out for about a day and a half. Even though crews got brought in from as far away as Colorado to fix the damage, there were still places that lost power for as much as two weeks. Fortunately I had some preparations for it, but I'm pretty sure I could still do better...