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Sunday, October 31, 2004
In the dark
If there's such a thing as a good time to have a power outage, it's the night of a time change, since as long as you were going to reset the clocks anyway...
My power was out from 5:35 P.M. to 1:05 A.M. Saturday night/Sunday morning. After the first half hour, I left to go to beautiful downtown Burbank. Had dinner, called my home number from my cell phone, answering machine didn't pick up. Saw "Team America: World Police," called my home number from my cell phone, answering machine didn't pick up. Thought about seeing "Ray," but realized I was probably a little too tired to sit through it, browsed around Barnes & Noble instead until they were about to close. Then I went home, where I listened to my iPod in the dark for a little while, and then went to bed. I woke up when the power came back on, set the time on my clock radio, and went back to sleep. Then I woke up again two hours later at about 2:00 standard time when one of the fire alarm bells in the building started ringing. Power outages always lead to fire alarms going off. It took about a half hour for the complex security guard to finally get it turned off.
There had actually been another power outage on Saturday morning while I was at work; I don't know how long it lasted, but the power had come back on at about 11:45 A.M. But things weren't quite right; there was apparently a brownout going on. My computer and TiVo seemed to have been working fine with the reduced power, but the halogen light in the living room was strangely dim, the nightlight in the bathroom wasn't lit at all, and some of the individual segments on my microwave's clock were off. At first I thought they had all been damaged by a power surge when the power had come back on, but after the second outage, they're all back to normal.
Incidentally, the backlight on an iPod makes a good emergency flashlight. My actual flashlight, it turned out, had some seriously weak batteries inside -- and I had recently gotten rid of some unused D batteries because I realized they were "best if installed by 2003." (Also, I had just sold on eBay a radio I'd had that took D batteries. I replaced it with one that took AAs.)
My power was out from 5:35 P.M. to 1:05 A.M. Saturday night/Sunday morning. After the first half hour, I left to go to beautiful downtown Burbank. Had dinner, called my home number from my cell phone, answering machine didn't pick up. Saw "Team America: World Police," called my home number from my cell phone, answering machine didn't pick up. Thought about seeing "Ray," but realized I was probably a little too tired to sit through it, browsed around Barnes & Noble instead until they were about to close. Then I went home, where I listened to my iPod in the dark for a little while, and then went to bed. I woke up when the power came back on, set the time on my clock radio, and went back to sleep. Then I woke up again two hours later at about 2:00 standard time when one of the fire alarm bells in the building started ringing. Power outages always lead to fire alarms going off. It took about a half hour for the complex security guard to finally get it turned off.
There had actually been another power outage on Saturday morning while I was at work; I don't know how long it lasted, but the power had come back on at about 11:45 A.M. But things weren't quite right; there was apparently a brownout going on. My computer and TiVo seemed to have been working fine with the reduced power, but the halogen light in the living room was strangely dim, the nightlight in the bathroom wasn't lit at all, and some of the individual segments on my microwave's clock were off. At first I thought they had all been damaged by a power surge when the power had come back on, but after the second outage, they're all back to normal.
Incidentally, the backlight on an iPod makes a good emergency flashlight. My actual flashlight, it turned out, had some seriously weak batteries inside -- and I had recently gotten rid of some unused D batteries because I realized they were "best if installed by 2003." (Also, I had just sold on eBay a radio I'd had that took D batteries. I replaced it with one that took AAs.)
