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Christmas Eve
Dec. 24th, 2004 07:58 pmAmerican Electric got our service restored around 1pm today. My Reindeer hat's off to them. They've had crews out 24 hours a day since this began. One could wish that the city of Columbus would show equal enterprise in dealing with the snow.
There were almost 300K without service at the height of the outage. The whole experience was actually rather relaxing, in an odd way. Last night when I got home the whole neighborhood was dark, except for the street lights (which have their own circuit). I wandered around outside taking pictures of the ice in the moonlight and lamplight. After that I lit my Christmas candles, then played with Flaster for a while. Finally we went to bed (a warm Cat's a good thing to have when the heat's out) and I laid in the dark listening to the radio, sipping cheap vodka and eating Cheez-Its. An extended blackout's like a vacation, in an odd way. You can't really do anything useful, so there's no guilt in just lying about the place and finding what pleasure you can.
By some strange mechanism that I don't pretend to understand, my water heater continued to function throughout the episode. Granted, it runs on gas, but I'd have thought some small amount of electricity was necessary to run the thermostat and valves. Evidently not. I need to learn more about how those work.
*****
I feel compensated in some minor fashion for having missed the Second East Coast Blackout back in 2002. I was so disgusted by that - it started in Akron, just a few miles from where I'd been living until only a few months earlier. The first big one in 1965 fascinated me, and I was bitterly disappointed to miss the repeat. I'd much rather be in a memorable blackout in the summer, where the electricity's out for hundreds of miles all around, but this is better than nothing.
*****
Babs apparently saw a transformer arc over and explode from the ice. I'm guessing that was the two flashes I saw when this started. Somewhere I've got some little blobs of copper from when a pole mounted transformer on a feeder line near our house exploded for no readily discernable reason many years ago.
*****
I ended up listening to the George Noorey Show on the radio last night. It's one of those shows that I keep intending to listen to more, but don't. He invites an entertaining miscellany of eccentrics, cranks and outright lunatics to expound their theories. Last night he had a pleasant old man who beleived that the earth (and all planets, come to that) is hollow, with a tiny sun in the centre and openings at either pole. This was a widespread belief among the marginally educated in the 1820s, and was popularized (if not actually invented) by a fellow from Ohio, who wrote books and gave lectures on the topic. I wasn't aware that anyone still held to it. It's one of those things that sounds vaguely plausible until you start trying to do the calculations. It'd make a neat RP world though.
At any rate, he seemed of average intelligence, well-spoken, and obviously sincere. Sadly, most of the phone-in callers sounded like they were off their medications.
*****
This morning I hit the Meijer's store before they closed for Christmas. It was weird. They were apparently in the process of losing electrical service while I was there. The overhead halogens were burning that weird dark purple, the incandescents were orangeish, and the fluorescents were strobing. Finally it all went out. A minute later the power started ebbing and flowing in cycles of roughly thirty seconds. You'd hear this deep hum as all the compressors kicked in, and the incandescents started to brighten, then it's all fade away again to darkness and silence. It made some of the shoppers obviously nervous. It gets to people when the machines stop. For myself, I couldn't help but think of what I've read about the 'Titanic', as the generators failed.
The unexpected thing (for me, at least) was that the Christmas music kept right on blaring away, and the hydraulic doors continued to operate. The cash registers had their own power too, but that wasn't so much of a shocker. I suppose the doors and sound system might be considered safety systems, and so have backup power.
*****
I called my mother earlier, and the weather is awful there too. She's in the Lake Effect belt. I'm going to go home for New Year's instead of Christmas, we decided. It's not worth getting stuck out in the middle of nowhere, which I've come close to before up there during lesser storms. She's cancelling her trip to my aunt Linda's too, and just staying home with the Cat from Hell.
As for me, I'll finally have achance to get some substantial work done on the Skiltaire suit.
*****
I'll be watching 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer' tonight. It seems peculiarly appropriate.
There were almost 300K without service at the height of the outage. The whole experience was actually rather relaxing, in an odd way. Last night when I got home the whole neighborhood was dark, except for the street lights (which have their own circuit). I wandered around outside taking pictures of the ice in the moonlight and lamplight. After that I lit my Christmas candles, then played with Flaster for a while. Finally we went to bed (a warm Cat's a good thing to have when the heat's out) and I laid in the dark listening to the radio, sipping cheap vodka and eating Cheez-Its. An extended blackout's like a vacation, in an odd way. You can't really do anything useful, so there's no guilt in just lying about the place and finding what pleasure you can.
By some strange mechanism that I don't pretend to understand, my water heater continued to function throughout the episode. Granted, it runs on gas, but I'd have thought some small amount of electricity was necessary to run the thermostat and valves. Evidently not. I need to learn more about how those work.
*****
I feel compensated in some minor fashion for having missed the Second East Coast Blackout back in 2002. I was so disgusted by that - it started in Akron, just a few miles from where I'd been living until only a few months earlier. The first big one in 1965 fascinated me, and I was bitterly disappointed to miss the repeat. I'd much rather be in a memorable blackout in the summer, where the electricity's out for hundreds of miles all around, but this is better than nothing.
*****
Babs apparently saw a transformer arc over and explode from the ice. I'm guessing that was the two flashes I saw when this started. Somewhere I've got some little blobs of copper from when a pole mounted transformer on a feeder line near our house exploded for no readily discernable reason many years ago.
*****
I ended up listening to the George Noorey Show on the radio last night. It's one of those shows that I keep intending to listen to more, but don't. He invites an entertaining miscellany of eccentrics, cranks and outright lunatics to expound their theories. Last night he had a pleasant old man who beleived that the earth (and all planets, come to that) is hollow, with a tiny sun in the centre and openings at either pole. This was a widespread belief among the marginally educated in the 1820s, and was popularized (if not actually invented) by a fellow from Ohio, who wrote books and gave lectures on the topic. I wasn't aware that anyone still held to it. It's one of those things that sounds vaguely plausible until you start trying to do the calculations. It'd make a neat RP world though.
At any rate, he seemed of average intelligence, well-spoken, and obviously sincere. Sadly, most of the phone-in callers sounded like they were off their medications.
*****
This morning I hit the Meijer's store before they closed for Christmas. It was weird. They were apparently in the process of losing electrical service while I was there. The overhead halogens were burning that weird dark purple, the incandescents were orangeish, and the fluorescents were strobing. Finally it all went out. A minute later the power started ebbing and flowing in cycles of roughly thirty seconds. You'd hear this deep hum as all the compressors kicked in, and the incandescents started to brighten, then it's all fade away again to darkness and silence. It made some of the shoppers obviously nervous. It gets to people when the machines stop. For myself, I couldn't help but think of what I've read about the 'Titanic', as the generators failed.
The unexpected thing (for me, at least) was that the Christmas music kept right on blaring away, and the hydraulic doors continued to operate. The cash registers had their own power too, but that wasn't so much of a shocker. I suppose the doors and sound system might be considered safety systems, and so have backup power.
*****
I called my mother earlier, and the weather is awful there too. She's in the Lake Effect belt. I'm going to go home for New Year's instead of Christmas, we decided. It's not worth getting stuck out in the middle of nowhere, which I've come close to before up there during lesser storms. She's cancelling her trip to my aunt Linda's too, and just staying home with the Cat from Hell.
As for me, I'll finally have achance to get some substantial work done on the Skiltaire suit.
*****
I'll be watching 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer' tonight. It seems peculiarly appropriate.
