Well, yesterday was awfully exciting... hm. No, that's not quite accurate. Yesterday was a whole lot of boring, in an overall environment of excitement. So click onward, dear reader, for my account of "the Great Blackout of 2003" (yes, I swear, that's what the local stations have been calling it)....
Plans for Thursday was light. A few errands, a movie to watch, and a quick late-night trip to pick up my sister-- she was due back from vacation in England late Thurs. night. She planned to take the limo shuttle from Newark (about an hour's drive) to the state line (about five minutes' drive), where I would pick her up around midnight or 1. (No big deal for me, the night owl.) She planned to sleep over and head on her merry way in the morning. Sooo... I looked at my list of errands, looked at the state of the house, and decided I'd get a little cleaning done before I ran my errands.
As a note, I abhor cleaning. That's not to say I like dirt and messiness, but the repetitive and ultimately pointless labor of regular housecleaning somehow gets under my skin more than does the presence of a few dust bunnies. Some people take comfort in the mindless acts of dusting and straightening and vacuuming, some people are compulsive about it... I'm just irritated by it, and can't bring myself to do it unless it *has* to be done. Messiness-- a stack of books next to the bed, a jacket hung over a bedpost instead of put away in a closet-- bothers me not at all, and I'm actually more comfortable in a lived-in room than in one that's painfully neat. Granted, I take "lived-in" to sublimely ridiculous extremes at times, but I'm not actually *disorganized.* There is order (of a sort) to my messiness, and I can generally lay my hand on whatever item I need, provided someone else hasn't "cleaned up" on my behalf. All of this conspires to mean that when it *is* finally get too much for me and I go into housecleaning frenzy, I usually have a *lot* of work to do.
So. I cleaned off a bed in the guest room (which becomes a sort of storage/dumping ground in the summer when no one's occupying it), cleaned the bathrooms, did laundry, got a little vacuuming done, paused for a late lunch, prepped dinner, cleaned the kitchen, loaded the dishwasher, was about to press the button to start it and-- the lights dimmed, and returned, and dimmed, and returned, and flickered, and went out. Oops.
4:11 pm. Well, alright, at least it wasn't a brownout. So: checked the circuit breakers, called my cousin next door to find out if she had power. She told me she was out, and the neighborhood about eight blocks down was out, too-- she'd just brought her son back from a music lesson. And, funny, the radio station she listened to on the ride home had just mentioned a power flicker, too... eheh. Well, now we know. I'd gotten most of my chores done, but my errands had just become pointless-- *no* one had power, the stores all closed. Those blank CDs I was going to buy, to burn a file for Dad? Ha. How was I going to burn a CD without power to the computer, hey? I couldn't even get my car out of the garage without consulting my dad for instructions (electric garage door opener-- amazing what we take for granted, no?).
For the most part, I was set. Plenty of candles and matches, flashlights and spare batteries, stashed around the house-- power is not something one takes for granted in the Adirondacks, where summer storms or a stupid person with a shovel can knock out your power for hours. My boom box runs on batteries and has a radio, so I could keep up on what was going on. More than anything, I was bored out of my mind. I tried to keep phone calls to a minimum, because the lines in our immediate area were badly congested. After a couple of hours of reading, I wound up going out to weed my lily bed, for lack of anything better to do. I even felt a little disappointed when the power came back at 8:15-- here I was, candles at the ready, prepared to have ice cream for dinner and wait out the siege, and they took my darkness away. Ah, well.
As matters turned out, my sister's flight wasn't even directly affected by the outage, although she was delayed. She was due to change planes in North Carolina, but the plane she was supposed to take to Newark was caught by storms and diverted to Georgia. She didn't even make it to Newark until 1:30 in the morning. I drove to Newark to pick her up, since the limo shuttle stopped service just after midnight. Aside from two toll barriers that were out of service, everything looked normal on the ride down-- a few towns were dark and traffic (ironically) was light, but most of North 'Jersey had power back already.
I wasn't even up much later than "normal" (for me). Still, I'm tired today. Must be all that housecleaning. See? Toldja. Housecleaning's bad for you. ; )
Posted by gris at August 15, 2003 04:26 PM