Well, this is just turning out to be a banner day.
5:30 am... music. snooze. cha-chunk. whirrrrrrr..... silence. Barely a chance to wake up and BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP. Yes, that's right, Puget Sound Energy dropped us off grid again. Forced energy conservation. Great. Now my clock radio (backup battery.. brilliant and painful) and the security alarm are letting us know simultaneously that I need to get up and that the power is out. The houses behind us who we thought were on Tacoma City were dark and and in the other direction didn't see lights until SeaTac, but it was still early.
Showered in the dark, that's cool. Stumbled around in the dark knocking stuff over. Cut myself some banana bread in the kitchen. Went down and rode the exercise bike. No lights, no Squawk Box, no WiFi. So I sat in the dark riding and playing, ironically, Minesweeper. Which I suck at and could not play for days and days.
Got dressed, manually opened both garages and put the cars in the drive and then headed out. Up to the FW/Tacoma intersection and the gas station has power. The last outage told me to fill the car's gas tank immediately. No wallet. So, on to work. Remember that there's at least food in my cube so I'll have lunch. (Didn't bring lunch - last outage told me not to open the refrigerator if I didn't need to.)
Despite my efforts to be a calmer driver, I did have to honk and flash my lights at someone. Even though it did no good. It was an impromptu 4-way on a dead red and she was refusing to get up there and take her turn. She should have stayed home.
I hear on the radio that it's localized to 10,000 homes along the arterial I'll be taking. So I cut over and drive through as many parking lots as I can, skipping a lot of 4-ways. Was great, though in retrospect, should one race through empty parking lots without one's wallet? Eh.
Get to work and realize that the stupid health screening is today for the health insurance and we weren't supposed to eat for 8 hours before. Today would have been the perfect day to do that. I should have just gone up and had it done anyway, then I would have looked really good at my follow-up. But I know they'd ask and I don't want to lie. I also don't want to go 8 hours without eating which is somewhat of a sad thing to say when I work here where despite our efforts and all the resources of our wonderful donors children still die at a rate of 4 a minute in Africa due to a lack of food or clean water.
So now I need to resched.
I tried to just vent on Twitter and get it out of my system but all it did was wipe out my post from last night. It's being a jerk today.
Well, I guess at this point there's nothing to do but go grab a nice hot cup of coffee and smile at it.
Bright spot... Amazon now say "March 27-April 30" as the estimated delivery date for our new new cell phones and gave us a DHL tracking code. DHL says today.
1 comment:
We had a sudden wind and rain storm shortly after lunch today. I have a second floor classroom and I heard a crash coming from the outdoor area behind my room and down the stairs used for pre-school's lunch and snack area. I calmly left my own kids in the classroom then hauled ass downstairs to see two teacher's aides frantically holding down a canopy used to cover the picnic tables... the fierce wind wanted to send it sailing into the classroom full of napping pre-schoolers. We felt like pirates as we battled the storm, loosening the sail (OK, it was a tarp on top of the canopy, which nearly ripped in half, nearly knocking us off our feet), and finally taking the whole thing apart. I was covered in water, dirt, and grime (it seems nobody had cleaned the canopy in, well, forever), then had to turn around, go back into my classroom, and convince the kids everything was fine. Down the road, a few blocks from school, a telephone pole was ripped out of the ground and flew onto the I-5... 10,000 homes lost power for at least the next 24 hours. An hour after the storm came, it left and we had blue and sunny skies the rest of the day.
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