Electrifying

Last night's "monsoon" was a humdinger, and it came complete with a fantastic lightning storm. Around 7 pm, our lights flickered off briefly, then clicked on again. Then they kept flickering off occasionally for the rest of the night. The TV news revealed that a big chunk of Atlanta had lost power, so we were lucky out in the country!

The spookiest part was taking Silver out. I waited until the rain diminished to a tolerable level, then walked her out toward the woods. In the back yard, we have a public-works floodlight on a pole (no, we don't know why; it seems like an incredibly unlikely place for one). The s.o. wishes it ill and contemplates throwing rocks at it, but I like having it because on moonless nights it makes walking the dogs a lot less unnerving. But what's really unnerving is being all the way out there, adjacent to coyotes and bobcats and who knows what-all, and suddenly having the light go off. And I could hear the transformers humming and crackling for miles around.

HUMMMMM...bzz!

*darkness*

"Uh oh... Hey, wait, why's the house still lit up?"

Bzzt!

"Never mind."

One of my birthday presents from my mother (who actually had her birthday yesterday...hi Mom!) was a little red L.L. Bean Grundig radio. You wind it up for 30 seconds and the dynamo keeps it running for half an hour. It has terrific reception and an emergency light, so even though our power remained on for the most part, we kept it handy and listened to NPR on it.

On the down side, the battery in my laptop is dead and has been dead for quite some time, so during the first power-down, a perfectly good e-mail was obliterated just as I was about to send it. I gave up and unplugged the computer--for safety's sake--for the next several hours.

One mostly unrelated electronic casualty was my Hello Kitty alarm clock. I was resetting the time and a piece of plastic inside it broke, causing the button I was pushing to plunge inward and become irretrievable. I unplugged it and opened it up with a screwdriver, and it was immediately apparent what was wrong. However, unless I want to spend a lot of time with superglue and then have it break again anyway, it's not fixable. I am contemplating buying a new Hello Kitty alarm clock (there are a ton of different models, believe me), but the s.o. seems to think I ought to buy something that's not powder-pink and covered in cartoon kitties and flowers. Hmm...