In the End, Not Much Happened

After about seventeen hours, my power is back on.

Last night it was so warm I decided to hide from the heat by taking a nap. That was going fine until I woke up around six PM and was hot. Also, the little portable AC unit was off, as was everything else that likes to use electricity.

It's the sorta thing I'm getting used to.

This time, however, the power didn't come back on after a minute or so, and I had no idea how long it had been off. So, I did what any normal person would do and panicked (but just a bit). It was around 95 or so inside the cabin (mid 30s, centigrade) and while I could stay reasonably cool thanks to water and wearing a damp T-shirt, I worried about my dog.

This week's waste of money was getting him one of those "Cool Beds," which are basically a hot water bottle filled with some spongy stuff, big enough for a dog to lie on and a couple fingers thick. He wants nothing to do with it. In his defense, it's not very cool, either, but I guess it would be if I could fill it with cold water. Since the cold water that comes from the tap is warm, I'd need to refrigerate the three gallons or so, and there's just not that much room inside the refrigerator.

But ... onto events!

After calming down a bit, I loaded Vinko into the Jeep and we drove down to the dog park. It's usually cooler there, but that may just be because of the half hour or so it takes to get there. We stayed there until it was too dark for me to distinguish him from some of the other dogs, and then stopped at the market to pick up some food. I'd heard on the radio that someone had run into a power pole and it could be a few more hours until power was restored to my area, so I wasn't sure I could use the electric range.

It was around nine at night and very dark driving home, but I passed by a number of homes that had electricity on, which I took to be a good sign. A few miles away from home, I didn't see anyone had power, so I braced for the worst and made it back to the cabin.

I should point out that even in the best and brightest of nights, I can't see anything inside the Jeep when I park it away. It has no working interior lights (but I might be able to fix that by pulling some fuse), so I can only grab what I can feel and anything missing is lost until the next morning. I didn't lose Vinko, but it was too dark for me to dissemble and eat the rotisserie chicken, so I dined on cole slaw and went outside to watch the meteors.

My view of them was somewhat compromised by a lightning storm far off to the north that kept ruining my night vision, but I saw a few great shooting stars and any number of smaller ones even in spite of the small number of clouds overhead.

Then, I decided to go to sleep and wake up early and catch the last few hours of meteors before the sun rose. I went inside the cabin, and the temperature inside hadn't dropped a bit, so I did the next best thing and surprised Vinko.

Among everything else, I have a portable mattress, yoga mat type thingy that's a couple inches thick and rarely gets used. I've always been a bit wary of what goes on outside at night, but it was such a nice night out (maybe 85 or so), that I threw caution to the winds, got wet in a cold shower, and laid down in my underwear on the mat behind the cabin to watch stars and fall asleep.

Within a matter of minutes, Vinko got up from where he'd been lying on the sand and joined me on the mat and, as far as I know, we both fell asleep.

For a couple hours, anyway.

Around two in the morning it got a bit chilly outside bivouacing, so I went back inside. It was cooler there, too, and we slept until dawn.

In the process of all that, which honestly isn't very much at all, I'd managed to break my flashlight and awakened to a cabin that still had everything needed for modern living except electricity. I learned that, if I'm desperate enough, I can make and drink room temperature coffee, but that's about it. I knew better than to heat up the stuff inside the refrigerator by opening it, so I again packed up Vinko and we headed back to the dog park. I stopped at a gas station for some coffee (which tasted great!), and we got to the park around six-thirty in the morning, greeted everyone and their dogs, and sat around watching and chatting.

It got too hot for that by eight thirty in the morning. Since the local radio said the power outage was now supposed to be resolved by noon, I took the Jeep in to see if there was something wrong with its wheel alignment. For the past couple months, once or twice I'd hit a bump on the road and the front would shimmy and it would take a couple seconds for me to regain control. The alignment is fine, and the guy said it's a Jeep thing, took ten dollars from me, and gave me a free keychain (one of those caribiner things.

It wasn't anywhere near noon, so I had the oil changed, the tires checked for proper inflation, stopped at a couple stores, and drove back home. I called the power company and the new, updated time for power to be restored was three-thirty in the afternoon, but now the outage was a result of the light winds and they'd called for extra help (I'm guessing from Palm Springs).

We got back, I fixed the flashlight by taking it apart and putting it back together, and I finished a book I'd been reading. It was in the low nineties when I decided to take a nap, and within five minutes of my lying down, all the clocks beeped.

It was just after twelve, about seventeen hours after the power went off, so I turned on the computer, paid my electric bill ($47.57USD) and sent them a "thank you" message. Then, I wrote this.