When the power goes away
This post almost didn’t make it to the server. Nothing to do with authoring, or software; I awoke this morning to a widespread power outage. The weather conditions have changed dramatically since yesterday, with the fog driven away by very high winds. Trees in motion, windows opening remotely, even the stress of a gas fireplace “blown out” by backdraft. And the back to an earlier age feeling of no electronic media providing our life soundtrack.
Actually, I was awake when the power went out; I had just placed a slice of naan bread in the microwave oven. The wonder of a box with no visible heat source now serving as a breadbox. Small wonder. During my highschool years, the loss of current with any weather change was well-documented, but that was decades ago. I had forgotten how fragile certain sections of the infrastructure could be. The comfort of a gas fireplace was short-lived, when the pilot light extinguished, and there was much manipulation of unfamiliar controls before our only source of interior lighting returned.
The down time was enough to give a final push. The wireless router at my sister’s is now “secure”. The risk of free wifi had been a topic of discussion last evening, and with nobody “doing anything on the Internet”, the return of electrical services allowed the pause for restructuration. Oddly enough, all of the cellphones remained active throughout the morning. At one point my nephew was trying to estimate the area affected by hydro failure by seeing where friends had logged into various instant message servers and social networks. Odd uses of technology abound in this modern age.
