Outages

Every damn time there’s even the least amount of wind…

 No exaggeration here. I started working on this and bam, power goes out.

Of Course It Did

Of all the times…

Thankfully, it didn’t last long this time. It’s just that in the past, it’s taken days for them to fix the power, and that’s not a good thing in the middle of summer. Or winter, knock on wood that doesn’t happen again.

Time To Write

There was a bad storm last week and I’m not even kidding this is exactly what happened.

The power was out for almost two days! It was cold! And boring!

Consoles

I hate power outages.

It was horrible. I mean, I still had my handhelds but come on! I was in the middle of a game!

The Storm

You may not have heard, but there was something of a storm last week. I live in New England. Blizzards are nothing new to me. I’ve driven in them, I’ve shoveled out from them, I’ve spent countless hours staring out the window at cars skidding around the corner. And I can say that in my twenty six and a half years, I have never seen one this bad.

For example, this is a visual representation of my driveway the next morning, a Saturday:

You think it just looks like a white square? That’s because it’s buried under two feet of snow! A snow shoveling service came to clean it out Sunday afternoon. And you might think that being snowed in isn’t an altogether bad thing. It wouldn’t have been if the power hadn’t gone out.

At about eight p.m., I noticed the lights flickering. I cringed every time it happened, until nine twenty when the power shut off completely. Earlier in the night I even tweeted about how I’d better shut down my computer in case of a power outage, but I did so to give myself the night off from editing, not because I believed something would actually happen.

No power, no television, no internet—I’ve dealt with that before. My posts were all set up for the week and I didn’t absolutely need to write during the weekend. But there’s one tiny problem when the power goes out in the winter: there’s no heat. I spent most of the weekend buried under two blankets, two quilts, and two cats.

So that was an adventure. And by adventure I mean punch to the face. The power didn’t come back on until two o’clock on Sunday, at which point I had to shovel out the end of the recently plowed driveway because the snowplows clearing the street kept burying it.

Winter can be over now please.

What to Do When the Power Fails

As I sit here on the eve of the hurricane, which is almost a week before this post even goes up because I plan in advance but let’s just pretend, I have to worry. Not about all the dangerous winds, flooding, and possible death but about a far worse fate: what to do should the power go out. During last year’s big hurricane I spent a solid minute trying to turn on the television before I believed the power was really out. Then there was a lot of sobbing. And I mean a lot because it didn’t come back for almost four days and by the end I was ready to start murdering people.

So here’s a list of things to keep you from going all Jack Torrance should you lose your internet connection.

1. Read.

            Obviously. In the time the power was out, I read four books and ten comic book volumes. The thing is, with the lights gone you have to rely on flashlights, so be careful of eye strain. Keep some aspirin and a shot of rum on the end table in case of a headache. What? How do you swallow pills?

2. Watch movies/shows on a laptop.

            To aid with your media withdrawal, set up the laptop and have a movie night. You have to be careful not to run out of juice, though. If you have a charger that can be plugged into a car, then you don’t have much to worry about.

3. Go for a walk.

            I know. Exercise. But desperate times call for desperate measures. After the last hurricane, when I went out to survey the damage I saw a lot of people out on constitutionals. Just watch out for fallen wires. As a bonus, bring along a phone and take pictures of yourself next to fallen trees and telephone poles and act like you knocked them down with your bare hands.

4. At night, find a traffic light.

            You want to stay far back enough so you won’t get hurt, but near enough to have a good view. I live near a somewhat busy stoplight and the last time the power went out, there was more than a little SCREEEEECH-BANG! Especially on a street where everyone thinks the speed limit is a rather low suggestion.

5. Play video games.

            Alas, the consoles and computer games will not work (or won’t once the charge runs out), but there’s always games to play on phones and portable devices. Just keep a car charger or a lot of batteries handy.

And that’s all. It might be too late for this storm, but there’s always another one on the way. Maybe next year! Keep this bookmarked ; ).