Thursday, July 20, 2006

Neighborhood #3: Power Out!

(my favorite Arcade Fire song...)

The family and I are, as of this writing (2:30pm Thursday), now 43 hours without power to our home. We had one hell of a storm on Tuesday evening that gratefully ended the heat wave, but apparently totally wiped out the electrical infrastructure to my neighborhood. We do not anticipate power to be restored until the weekend. Rosebud and Pepe have been real troopers throughout the whole thing, and gratefully, the pool has remained open, and our neighbors generously plugged our fridge into their generator.

We have de-camped to my Mom's nearby, as her power was restored last night, and are headed out tomorrow with the Trekking Blah sock to the Mr. S's dad's place on the Chesapeake Bay for the weekend. Both places have crappy dial-up (Mom actually has a wi-fi network, but it has been knocked out along with her cable TV), so blogging and commenting will the very limited until we in Audubon, PA return to civilization.

So I have had two days of cold showers,instant coffee (blech!) and being totally media-free. I have had moments where I realized that we were (before we plugged into the generator) consuming absolutely no energy, our little family, and I felt really virtuous. And then I wanted my dishwasher back. And my broadband. But mostly my dishwasher. I hate doing dishes by hand.

So I have been knitting dishcloths. You can knit them in the dark, and they make me feel less pissed about the damn dishes.

Wah wah wah.

7 comments:

Ann said...

Yikes! I would miss the AC the most of all ...

Enjoy some time free of the media manipulations -- we'll all be waiting for you when you return!

Martina said...

Kind of like stepping back in time isn't it? Life was so much more work without all our electrical doo dahs!

Anonymous said...

I lived for two years "off the grid", deep in the woods, alone and loved it.

But, it's different when all the things that are supposed to be working are all around you and not. You feel a little like a lab animal trapped in an enviornment, like how many times will you try to turn on a switch before it sinks in that it's not working! Doh!

Glad you have your knitting though. Monopoly helps too :-)

Tania A said...

I too hate doing dishes by hand. And though I'd like to say being without electricity would be good for me, I like my cable tv and my broadband internet far too much to actually go without.

Anonymous said...

at least you get to go to the chesapeake bay for the weekend.....ummmmmmmm.....crabs......beer.....cool breezes.....beer.....paper plates.....beer.....

anne marie

Dorothy said...

Urgh! I thought half a day was terrible enough. I do hope your power is restored soon!
I've only had a dishwasher for a month now, but I know I would lose it if I had to do dishes by hand again.

iSeL said...

Oh no, that really sucks. I was without power for a few days and couldn't take it anymore. You're lucky about the fridge though.

Hope everything comes back to normal soon. :D