Dear reader,

You do not appreciate the luxury of right now.  Yes, right now.  You in your cozy wherever-you-may-be, with your feet up, perhaps, lazing about and checking Facebook every ten minutes or so, or browsing through email and reading this.

You have electricity.  It's pretty friggin' awesome.  It's so awesome I considered swapping "friggin'" for "fucking", but I didn't because this is a family blog.

(Oops)

Anyway.  In my neck of the woods, our power lines are buried– a delightful little idea that is really rather convenient when it comes to things like massive snowstorms and gale-force winds making their appearance.  So while the outer ring of hell the DC area sat in the freeze and waited for a Pepco miracle, I and my compatriots got to obsess over every miserable inch that fell on top of inch; we ate hideously large amounts of food; we imbibed as if the storm were going to rob us of yeast to ever make booze again; and generally were able to kick back in our socked feet while many suffered in the murderous cold. 

Take the blows that come my way and deal with them gracefully, I always say.

Except that there is this pesky and little-regarded thing called salt corrosion.

It chews through delightfully buried power lines.

It makes them break.

This interrupts you mid-Beatles RockBand slaying.

And your preschooler cannot understand what the fuss is and why you can't just turn the lights on, mommy.

The cat scurries away for dear life.

So you call Pepco and their automated voice very nicely assures you that you may have your power restored by 6 pm, the following day.

It's cold and eerily quiet, and  the lights don't come on and neither does the heat, when there is no power.  There is no Internet.  (collective gasp)  And when you walk into a room and you want to see its contents, you flip the switch and get nothing.  The fridge gets opened seldom; and each time, reverentially, as if it were old and coming apart at the seams.  The garage door has to be released and pushed up manually, and if you don't watch it, it can pinch your fingers.  And oh, the fancy smoke alarm/carbon monoxide detectors/banshee wailers from hell decide that they'll run out of battery in the middle of the night and then, later, break; so that even after you change their battery and the power is on and everything else in the house is acting normal and making noise and you're glad you're part of the twenty-first century, they still randomly chirp their evil loud chirps until you pull some feat of anger and superhuman strength and rip one of them right off the ceiling and get nasty plaster crumbs dropping vengefully in your mouth.

So, this is just to say that I'm very happy that the power is back on.

Carry on.

18 Feb This entry was published on February 18, 2010 at 10:39 pm. It’s filed under DC Dukkha, Domestic Bliss and tagged electricity, insanity, no lights on, pepco, power outage. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.