Just in case you thought I was dead, here’s an update of what’s been happening with/to me over the last little while.
2003-08-14: I spend the morning cleaning up around Xoozland, getting the place ready for the upcoming Annual Garden Party and Deck Warming Celebration. At 3:00 pm, I go into the office, expecting to have a nice, productive evening working The Late Shift and getting lots of stuff done. At 4:10 pm, the power goes out. This is not an abnormal occurance in this building as the power sometimes goes out during a lightning storm or in the heat of summer. An announcement over the P.A. system indicates THIS is not a normal situation as the power is out all over the city… um, all over the province… um, all over Ontario, Quebec, Michigan, and New York. The bosses decide to shut down the system as we aren’t sure how long the power will be out, or how long the UPS will last. Better to shut down gracefully than to have it crash completely. Looking out the window, I see that traffic at the corner is tied up for blocks, so I decide the sit back and cool my hoofies. The phones are working, so I call my parents long distance to see if they have power. They don’t. They say my cousin has been going out to the car to try to get some news on the car radio (no battery-powered radio there), but was fed up with all the Country Music being played. Small towns… sheesh! Attempts to call Chocoholic fail as she has one of those new-fangled cordless telephones that don’t work without power! She does not have one of the old fashioned plug-it-into-the-wall-and-it-works phones… yet. Around six o’clock, I figure traffic has died down enough so I head home. The drive takes just 20 minutes, about the same amount of time it would have taken at that time of day under normal circumstances! Once home, I take out the gas-powered lawn mower and cut the grass. I get out the hand-powered sweeping device (aka broom) and start sweeping up the driveway. (I was originally planning to use my brother’s power washer to do a Really Good Job, but in an energy crisis…) I find my old walkman and some batteries, and tune in to the CBC for updates on the situation. I pull out the patio torches and fill them with citronella fuel, getting them ready for the party. Later in the evening, I make myself a nice pot of tea (gas stove! heeheehee), put the citronella torches in a semi-circle, get a lawn chair and table, and kick back to write in my (not online live-) journal and read a book. Power outage? WHAT power outage? When you’ve just spent eight days in the bush on a canoe trip, a power outage just doesn’t seem like much of a crisis! Hell, I’d been drinking purified lake water all week, so even THAT didn’t worry me. I think about the last time there was a Big Power Outage along the Eastern Seaboard, and how there was a Mini Baby Boom nine months later. And I think about what Chocoholic and I would be up to if she weren’t somewhere all the way across town!
2003-08-15: I wake up at 4:14 am (according to my wristwatch) and notice that my bedside alarm clock is flashing “12:56”. This means the power came back on around 3:20 am, being off for about 11 hours. I turn the battery-powered radio back on, and sit in the semi-darkness listening to reports of what’s happening throughout the city. Lots of sections still don’t have power. The radio says the Government is telling people to stay home from work today, unless what they do is an Essential Service. I decide that doesn’t apply to me so I plan to stay home. Later in the morning, I finally talk to Chocoholic, and we decide she is going to ride her bike all the way across town to my house, and I am going to hop on my bike and meet her half way so I can get some exercise, too.
At this point, the actual time of events becomes a little blurred… I don’t remember what things we did on which days… we were SO busy getting Xoozland ready for the party!
[work in progress… stay tuned for Part 2, coming to a livejournal near you!]
