Thursday, August 11, 2005

Fun With Electricity 

So I’m out on the back porch reading old news -- my in-laws get the local paper secondhand from Great Grandma Edie just up the hill -- when the garden goes quiet. Too quiet.

Moments later the in-ground fountain starts back up. Inside, Darcie and her mother breathe a sigh of relief as the fans regain their whir -- when you don’t air-condition, the loss of fanage is a pretty hot deal.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the utter chaos and adventure of night-time power outages. (For the same reasons, I also like fire drills and formal events.) But daytime power loss is worse than useless. It is annoying – no landlines available, no appliances. More importantly, it can be dangerous without the fun of breaking your toe on the coffee table. Old people dying of heatstroke and defrosted fishcake are just the beginning.

Electricity is a funny thing, and not just because a short makes the cash register at 7-Eleven read THANK YOU FOR “HO”ING AT 7-GLGVGN. Case in point: When we trickle-charged the dead car battery overnight, the CD player finally spit out whatever disk it’s been gagging on since January. Unfortunately, instead of that long-missing Dolly Parton cover album I had hoped was stuck in there, it turns out to be some random top 40 compilation that could have stayed lost. And the CD player still doesn’t work

Back home, even the quickest outages cause upheaval in our AC/DC universe. For the rest of the day, clocks are off all over the house. I get duration -- boiling the egg noodles for nine minutes is no problem -- but I can’t figure out if I’m serving supper late or early. Dusk comes as a complete surprise.

Interesting, by the way, how you never notice how much time there is until it all goes kablooey. Including stove, coffeepot, and under-the-counter radio, my in-laws have three clocks in their two-wall walk-through kitchenette. I haven’t worn a watch in years, but I only ever need one to reset the wallpowered world outside.

And speaking of the world outside: according to the local paper, some 4000 people in a nearby town lost power the other day when a squirrel got caught between two power lines. Ah, local news. Don't tell the terrorists; they'll get ideas.

posted by boyhowdy | 11:04 PM |

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Comments:

We had a quick power outage yesterday too. Probably the same one. All of a sudden all the noise in the house stopped. 2 computers, a/c, a fan, the TV, all stopped. The cat started running around like the world stopped.

There was a fire at VY about 6 or 8 months ago (some power thing outside), it turns out a squirrel got in.

I <3 Vermont!

# posted by  Lady Strathconn : 10:03 PM, August 12, 2005

 

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