Waiting for the Power to go Out

As I've mentioned before, it used to be that being inside on a bad weather day was actually kind of fun. But in the past decade or so, I've lived in places with abysmal power grids and bad weather just means an inevitable loss of power. And so I live in fear every time the wind speed goes over 10 mph. This is nearly intolerable, given our country's wealth and resources. We haven't lost power yet which is remarkable given this horrible winter (3 snow-days for my kids in 2 weeks), but our luck must run out some time.

Unlike the summer brown-outs, which can be avoided (we're told) by reducing energy use, the winter weather blowouts are unavoidable. I still have the summer habits as my initial thought, i.e. "if I turn off all the lights, maybe the power will stay on!" But no. In fact, I should do the opposite: use as much energy as I can before the shaky trees and 50 year old made-in-Burma transformers implode.

And unlike the summer, where at least the roads are accessible during an outage, in the winter we're stuck indoors with no heat, no power, no fridge, and I get flash-memories of The Shining.