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Monday, November 11th, 2002 11:19 am
My house still has no electricity.

I haven't opened the fridge. Everything in there is certainly no good now. Sometime when I have natural light to work with, I'll empty the whole thing. My neighbors on the left have already given up and emptied theirs. They had to; they'd been opening it. They can't afford to eat out for a week like I can. No one in that house has a job.

The pool didn't overflow... at least not into the living room.

The house gets quite cold at night. If there's no power by tonight, I'm breaking out the camping gear. Y'know, I gotta wonder whether there's a local law against insulation. I've lived five different places since moving to the Bay Area and none of them were insulated worth a damn. No wonder we are such power hogs. (I have windows that don't close. I'm not kidding; they don't close. Where I grew up, anyone who created such a design would be taken out and shot.)

This is a personal record for me; this is the longest I've ever been without electricity. In the blizzard of 1978 a good chunk of New England declared a state of emergency that lasted well over a week: no civilian use of roads, people were trapped in office buildings and surviving from the vending machines, etc etc... and the power didn't stay out this long. A few years ago I was in the Outer Banks, North Carolina, when a hurricane came through and wiped out anything that wasn't nailed down. Homes were destroyed, roads had to be excavated from under several feet of sand... and the power didn't stay out this long. God help Sunnyvale if it ever gets any real weather.
Monday, November 11th, 2002 07:04 pm (UTC)
When I move to my own Big Piece Of Middle O' Nowhere, the house will have seamless stand-alone power capability.

That's what I dream of. Complete stand-alone... and no buying fuel, either; that's worse than being on the grid. Solar or wind, I'm guessing. Haven't researched enough to know exactly what I want it to look like. Whatever it is won't fit where I am now.