Oct.13-19 - More Returns and Changes

FZZZT!

A funny thing happened on the way to this, my 1000th post.

As I was lining up a brief post early Tuesday evening it was with nothing particularly auspicious to offer, deciding it was simply time to do a minor update of some sort before dropping into some other items out in the real world.

I went into the oven that morning - meeting with the boss - and I emerged in one of those Secret Clock Is Ticking scenarios. Largely what I expected, which means that I'm moving ahead with much the same heavy object hung over my head. Lists to make, schedules to set and a more managerial/directorial mindset to get into if I'm to survive this without major upheavals.

All standard tasks - all the things that need to get done and have been getting done - those count for very little, apparently, because they've always been done I suppose. The coal miner meets the new, larger quotas and brings home the rent and food money, so that eventually becomes expected and then people start to gripe at him because there's no beach house in the immediate future.

Eh. I'll get over it. It kills me a little each day, but I'm hardly unique in that. Besides, some irritating voice inside tells me that if I truly wanted things to change I'd make it happen. How is something the little voice never tells me.

After some problems the day before that caused me to spend late Monday afternoon in a doctor's office and then getting prescriptions filled, my wife was feeling much better by that evening. We'd been in a humid heat wave for a few days and a line of thunderstorms was headed our way that would leave us running at least 10 degrees cooler come Wednesday.

Arrived they did, in a tight wall that turned the sky into a black brew as winds howled across the brickwork, rain hammered everything it could reach and even large trees were bending over like it was Gay Pride Day in San Francisco.

A couple power dips provided the little extra warning, so I saved what I had open on the computer and shut down. Five or ten minutes later the power went out.

And it stayed out.

I took a short walk and saw that a huge tree had fallen across both lanes of the main side-street -- fortunately farther down the hill than would affect us directly. We'd heard sirens close by a few minutes before, and apparently it was local rescue/fire crews shooting around to put traffic cones down as warning. While I watched I saw a car shoot down the hill, likely in that high-accident state of being so close to home, so much on familiar territory, that he wasn't paying attention. (I read a numberless statistic once that said that most accidents happen within a few miles of home or work, where people either haven't really started paying attention or they've stopped because mentally they were already at their destination.) He hit the breaks too lake, went into a skid on the newly-slick road and took out the middle traffic cone. There was plenty of distance between that and the tree, so aside from a scare the driver and vehicle were okay.

Half an hour or so later I took a drive, partially to see how far the blackout extended and partially to sit in air conditioning for a while.

It was a chaos of dead traffic lights, broken branches, fallen trees and various items that had been moved considerable distances by the wind. The Most Moved (and/or destroyed) Objects were those shopping cart shelters -- those "Return carts here" kiosks with the tented roofs to help keep rain off the coralled carts. Apparently few if any places bothered to bolt those down, so during the thick of the storm these were lurching, probably hopping, across parking lots, some of them giving way to the stress of becoming failed kites, while others hopped burbs and started to tumble into adjacent lots and out into the streets.

Some problem triggered a railroad crossing, leaving enough space for only a single line of cars to get through. To the credit of most people -- as was seen at the deadlighted intersections -- people were doing a good job of being civil and taking turns. Indeed, the only times the flow was seriously interrupted was when a cop or some errant emergency worker decided to step in and play traffic cop. In general they screwed matters up. Sometimes people are best left to be adults on their own, not told to do what they're told -- especially by someone who doesn't do a good job of it.

Downed trees were common. On one side-street while I was trying to make my way back via an alternate route I suddenly saw the densest wall of gray-black smoke I'd ever seen blocking my way, an instant later realizing it was a previously very healthy and huge fir tree that was blocking both lanes and filling the view of my headlights.

My servey showed me that I had to travel nearly seven miles to find anything that wasn't lit only by emergency lights or having its own generator. A shopping center across from where I work was the first functional area, marking the beginning of a lengthy strip, though everything to both sides of that strip was dead.

The high winds that accompanied the storm faded but left us with breezes for a while, so with the windows open it was comfortable enough for half the family to sleep, but as the night wore on it became worse for my wife and younger son, both of whom have asthma. We've never had a sustained outage before - not more than a couple hours - so we were anticipating the power coming back soon.

Around 4:30 I was up again, and decided to take another drive down by work, in part to see what signs of repairs were to be seen and to hit a Genuardis just past work that had still had power the night before. Aside from a few items I wanted to get several bags of ice. I also got some extra money back so the family would have some cash on hand.

I was encouraged by seeing a few of the traffic lights working and the powered strip along Germantown Pike extended more towards my direction than it had been six hours earlier. Even the strip-mall of stores and the bank near where I work had power again.

So, I took a few items, four bags of ice and an update back home. One bag each in the refrigerator and freezer compartments in the kitchen, the other two down into the large chest freezer downstairs. I made a point to my wife that she should seriously consider calling her parents not only to check in but to first see that they had power and then to see if they would mind (which, of course they wouldn't) having her and the kids as guests for a little while. She was reluctant at first, but by mid-morning she would relent.

Then I got myself ready for work and headed in, using the older van without air conditioning (Ari and Nick in particular needed to have a fall-back spot for air-conditioning) getting there around 6am. First one in, and no power in the building. We were still part of the blackout that the suburban development behind the building was experiencing.

We soldiered on as best we could without power as my assistant and some others arrived. Fortunately the field work was all but unaffected, so that much went on, but most of the office work was at a standstill. The elaborate phone system requires its own power, so that was dead, too.

Speeding matters up, people were indirectly given the word that they could leave by 3:30. Ari had had Travis call me mid-morning to let me know that she and Nick had headed for her parents' place and Travis had stayed home, possibly he and I heading back there later in the day. A couple minutes before I headed home Trav called me to say the power had just come back on and to ask if I was going to call Ari. I decided to hold off, as I wanted to see the power stay on for most of an hour or so before declaring it fixed.

So, home to the first coolness of the day. Cable (which included this internet connection) were still out, but everything else was fine. A shower was the next step, then I called Ari. She and Nick were comfortable, but exhausted -- they'd waited longer than they should have and the effort to breathe had taken a lot out of them; they decided to stay back there for the night.

Speeding matters some more, power remained out at work Thursday - prompting me to ultimately take my computer and printer set-up and some other things home - and Friday, and as of my most recent check-via-phone (calling the fax no.) is still out. PECO was making claims yesterday that it would be restrored in that area today. I came in for most of the morning Thursday and Friday, not wanting to wholly abandon my assistant. We set him up with physical work that could be done without power and which would minimize our delays once the power came back, but the building was becoming warmer, the air thicker and smellier by the hour.

So... that's been most of my week.

I've established that I cannot take the heat and humidity -- among other things my skin condition flares up doubly bad in the heat as my own sweat triggers it. My face gets very red very quickly and my temper grows short. The best I can explain it is if I were to ask you to imagine that you contained your very own supply of poison ivy, encapsulated in your skin. Crank up the heat and humidity, the sweat flows and disccolves the micro-capsules and your skin begins to crawl. It's probably the worst time for me to be around people, especially people who are trying to be funny. I'm amazed that all I did was become somewhat foul-mouthed. A savage within was prompting me to kill the source of any offending noise and as is often the case it was mainly thoughts of subsequent legal action that stopped me. I fear that if there were truly some summertime apocalypse I'd be leaving some extra bodies in the shadows.

Several aspects of the week took more out of me than I'd expected, and the past few days I've been sleeping more than usual and operating at low energy beyond that. Even once I could get back online at home it wasn't until this morning that I've felt a strong enough urge to communicate with anyone, and even now it's more of an impulse born of the lure of blank space and a need to chronicle an odd week because I'll inevitably want to recall something of it.

I've been checking on the situation at work largely because I'd prefer to be able to get in and move things along ASAP once the power's back on, rather than wait for Monday. We're going to be badly behind for a couple days as it is. Keep in mind, while we and a few hundred thousand other people may have been without power, the majority had it all along, so it's been business as usual for them and most of them will not be much interested in any excuses for delays.