December 6, 2005

• What a night I’m having!

  About halfway through my latest reading on KaiOaty, we had a brief
  power outage.  A few hours before that, another little break in
  the electron flow had nudged Doug away from the computer and off to his
  bed.  I welcomed that first blink of the lights, but not the
  second one.  Since I’d gone as far as I had, and had a clear
  picture in my mind before I started of where the reading was going, I
  got back into x-Tools and reconstructed what I’d lost.

  Then, throughout the next four hours, I wrote, rewrote, saved a
  paragraph at a time, and lost count of the flickers and blinks. 
  Pretty soon, I noticed that the big blinks were preceded by little
  flickers, so I’d save what I had whenever there was the merest
  suggestion of a dimming of the lights.  That saved me a lot of
  reworking. 

  Maybe it was persistence, perseverance and a sense of responsibility
  that kept me going.  Maybe it was just OCD.  I wanted to
  finish the job, and now I’m really only about one hour past the time
  I’ve
  been getting to bed recently.  I’ve been letting my diurnal cycle
  go long to stay out of phase with Doug’s during the deep two-week cold
  snap so we could keep the fire going.  I’m not tired so much as
  I’m
  relieved right now.  I got it done.  Now our only backlog at
  KaiOaty’s site is a past-life reading for Greyfox to do.

  Looking back over the night, I don’t think I even felt any
  frustration.  Each time as I waited for the computer to come back
  up, I’d get up and get a warm-up on my coffee.  One of the times,
  I got a bowl of chips and a cup of salsa.  During none of the
  little intervals of darkness was the power off long enough for me to
  feel any anxiety that it would be a lengthy outage.  Being
  forewarned by the blink that kicked Doug offline clued me to the wisdom
  of saving frequently, so I never lost much.  I even think that the
  necessity for rewriting some of my work improved my clarity of
  communication.

  There’s a nice difference in this computer compared to our old
  one.  Such momentary outages would turn the old one off and when
  it came back up it would be in safe mode or it would give us ominous
  error messages about incomplete shutdowns, and such.  This one, if
  the outage is brief enough, just restarts itself.  Even if it is a
  lengthy outage and we have to push the “on” button to get it back up,
  it comes up looking healthy and normal, none of that alarming stuff we
  got from the old one.  Aaah, the best things in life are free.

  Warmth is one of the best things in my life, and we’ve got some! 
  In the last two days, the temp has come up more than forty degrees,
  into the low twenties.  That’s balmy after a couple of weeks of
  minus-twenties.  Koji has been going out every few hours and
  staying out there for twenty minutes or more.  During these past
  weeks of colder weather, he’d make about two reluctant and hurried
  trips out each day. 

  We have one cat who never wants to go outside (Nemo), and one (Muffin)
  who doesn’t go out at all in cold weather.  After one trip out
  into the snow last month, little Alice has been staying in the
  house.  Likewise with Cecil; he appears to be another winter
  housecat.  Bobo will go out in any weather and doesn’t seem to
  have sense enough to come in when it’s life-threateningly frigid. 
  I’ve had to go out and bring him in a couple of times when he was just
  huddled there shivering.  He and his adopted brother Albion have
  been in and out several times today.  Old Granny Mousebreath likes
  to go out hunting unless it’s ten below or colder.  She has been
  enjoying the relatively mild temps today, too.

  It feels great to me, not having to dress for outdoors to be
  comfortable indoors.  I have even been able to get some pieces of
  my last shower out of the bathtub.  Y’see… the drain was frozen
  before I filled up the camp shower and made myself presentable for the
  health clinic.  Usually in winter I bail the gray water out of the
  tub into a bucket and haul it out as we do dishwater, etc.  That
  time, the usual bucket was in use and by the time I got home from the
  clinic the water in the tub had frozen. 

  The cats had a little ice skating rink for a few days.  It warmed
  up enough today that Doug started breaking the rink into pieces. 
  I finished the job tonight and put the pieces into the bathroom sink
  where they can melt and drain away.  That drain only freezes in
  the coldest weather, and I can thaw it by opening the cabinet under the
  sink and aiming the heater at the u-trap.  The bathtub will need a
  couple of days of above freezing temperatures before it drains on its
  own.

  Subarctic suburban living at its… best?  craziest?  I
  dunno.  I just know I like it here on the edge of the fringe of
  the back of beyond, and there’s enough ironic humor value in some of
  the trade-offs to turn them into assets.
  

  • 7:47 am
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