Musings on a power outage
The power has been out about five hours as I write this. I’m conserving my laptop battery, and I hope it lasts until power is restored.
I’m glad it’s cool out. I can’t bear the heat. If it warms up later, I’ll have to go down into the basement, or get in my car and drive somewhere. I don’t want to spend any money, though, and I know if I drive around, I’ll be tempted to buy a hamburger or an egg McMuffin or something. I can’t make coffee or even a bowl of cereal. So far I have had a couple of bananas, the last few Oreos, and a couple of glasses of warm cola. Breakfast of champions.
I have been trying to think of things do that don’t require electricity. I have our Red Cross radio on some local “classic rock” station. Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, Teenage Wasteland, that sort of thing. There is a lot of yard work I would like to do, but between everything being wet from the storm and my not having any way to clean up afterward (we have well water, so no power means no water), I probably won’t be doing yard work today.
However, there are things I can do. For example, I have been straddling two different laptop bags for over a year now. Yes, that’s ridiculous. It’s just been really low on my to-do list. But now I have gone through all of pouches and pockets of my old laptop bag, tossed a lot of things I never used (or just plain garbage), and moved the rest to various pouches in the new laptop bag. So hooray, I’ve accomplished something. That took the better part of an hour, if you include the time I have spent playing with Vixen.
I’ve also been playing with Vixen, of course. She seems to sense that something isn’t quite right, but she’s been making the most of it, batting around and chasing the odd little gizmos I pulled out of my old laptop bag but hadn’t yet thrown away or put into the new laptop bag. Now she’s taking a break and lounging on my calves.
I think I may tackle the pile of paperwork that’s been piling up on my desk. Old receipts, work orders from repair work on our house, that sort of thing.
Oh, hey! The power just came back on! Yay! Now I can spend the next two hours reading Facebook….
[ten minutes later]
And now the power’s back off. I had ten minutes of power, and I wasted it on Facebook (what, you thought I was kidding?). Well, when the power comes on again (if it does), I certainly won’t be wasting it! The first thing I will do is make a pot of coffee. After that, I will read my email. After that… I’m not sure.
I guess I will go ahead and sort out those papers now.
[later]
The power is on, I have a hot cup of coffee, and I am making a dent in these papers.