What Is Going On?

After two days of losing phone and Internet service this week, I lost power today.

Actually, my entire neighborhood lost power just as I drove through a very busy intersection during rush hour. A bright flash in front of me from the next block and then the traffic lights (and street lights) died just as I entered the intersection.

That was fun.

Then lights returned, another flash, and the lights went dark again. When I got home, everything was dark, except for one more flash from the same area. I wonder what blew?

I reported the outage. This time my cell phone still worked. And I checked the Internet to see where the outage was. I got a DTE map of the outage and could see that getting around the dead traffic lights would require major re-routing, a lot of time, and no real guarantee that the outage wasn't wider than the map showed.

Being able to do that is so cool, really. A freaking map with the outage already posted was available! We couldn't do that in the 20th century.

DTE estimated power up at tomorrow night at 11:30 p.m. I assumed that was a Star Trek Scotty estimate. But who knew?

Did I mention I had a cooler filled with expensive meats that had arrived in the mail that afternoon?

Yeah.

Anyway, I unplugged all the important stuff. Pulled out a battery power supply and converter for a lamp later in the evening and to recharge my phone; grabbed a candle and all the flashlights I could find; ate some peanut butter and crackers for dinner (opening the refrigerator was right out, of course--not even from that strange impulse to open it to verify there is no power); and got out a sleeping bag since it would probably get a tad chilly overnight.

I thought of walking somewhere for a beer and food, but the map seemed to indicate everything in walking distance was in the dead zone. So I'd stay home.

I pulled out Lamb's little-used portable DVD player (she enthusiastically converted to Netflix) and hoped it had some charge in it. It had enough power to watch four episodes of Get Smart! And one had freaking Leonard Nimoy as one of the villains! What the Hell? I'll have to watch that again to the end since power came back on at that point, so I started putting stuff away and plugging in stuff. It was only 3 hours of outage, as it turned out.

And then I had to blog it, of course. This counting as a crisis in the modern American comfortable middle class life. And thank goodness. You don't want to huddle and pray for MV-22s to drop off plastic sheeting, food, and water.

But unfortunately, I was not able to get over to my Ex's home to pick up Mister to take him to a concert he was in earlier this evening. She was able to handle the duty although that meant Lamb might have more concert than she banked on. But my Ex's house and the route to the high school was outside the blast radius of this problem.

At least my phone worked, so I was able to explain where he wears a cummerbund and how to adjust the bow tie on his tuxedo.

Phone and Internet out. Electricity out. If I get locusts this weekend, I'm really going to worry.