This weekend’s rolling blackouts, and other various power erratta didn’t really affect me that much.
On Thursday we lost power like everyone else in Ontario, New York, New Jersey, Conneticut, Vermont, and Michegan. It was out at our place until about 4:30am on Friday morning.
It took me about 30 minutes to get home (pretty typical), but it took Char nearly 2 hours. I found that in the East end, people were pretty much obeying the traffic signals as 4 way stops rules, although there were a good number of yahoos who had to be chastized.
Our friends Tiffany, Jeff, Tim, and Nikki were supposed to be on a plane to England around 6:00 Thursday afternoon. They called to ask us what was going on around 6:30, and I explained the situation to them. Since none of them had radios or anything, it was the first they had heard of it.
Antenna signals started fading in and out around 7:00, and I lost my CTV signal that I had pulled up on my portable TV around then.
Char and I went for a walk and it was positively erie to see the city blanketed in darkness. I was actually surprised by how few people were out walking around. Once it got dark, it became practically impossible to see where you were going. Just as your eyes would adjust to the darkness, another car would come around a corner and screw up your night vision.
We got a call from the England bound folks around 9:30 saying that they had gotten their boarding passes, and were off.
Since it was stifling in our apartment, we decided to sleep out under the stars. I inflated an air mattress (with the power of my mighty lungs), and outfitted it with some sheets and a sleeping blanket. Because there was no light pollution, we had a great view of the stars, and in particular the shooting stars which lit up the night sky. I must have counted a good dozen awesome looking falling stars.
We woke up around 5:00am with a ton of dew on us, and decided to dive into our real bed for the last couple of hours.
On Friday morning, Premiere Ernie Eves had declared a “State of Emergency”, so I called in to work to make sure there were enough people to cover a shift, and took it easy. Since I had power, I booted up the laptop and kept an eye on things from home (taking the time to work on a small web project at the same time). Not much productive got accomplished though. We skipped out at one point to grab some cash, just in case the power went out again (I only had about $10.00 on me). The regular bank machines weren’t working, but the “fast cash” machines that cost an extra $1.50 were working fine. I’ve never been happeir to fork that buck fifty over.
Friday night we went for a walk, just as our first rolling blackout came by. It didn’t really do anything to us though, since we were heading out anyway. We went over to Jeff and Tiffany’s and checked on their cat, who was doing just fine. When we got home, we watched This is Spinal Tap, so now finally Char really knows what I mean when I say “I’m gonna go to 11”.
By Saturday morning we were feeling stir crazy, so we went out for a drive, stopping at Home Depot (for some Wasp Spray, because our deck was getting over-run), and Best Buy…where I came to the realization that there are no games I want to play right now! Damn!
Saturday night we went out for Chinese food with Larry and Liz downtown. The place was awesome, and we had fried lobster, this awesome beef dish, steamed scallops, and a curried chicken dish. It was really good, afterwards we headed off to Greg’s Ice Cream, where I finally had some of Greg’s frozen treats (Char and I have meant to go there for about 4 years now). Back at Larry and Liz’s place, we watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail before heading home.
This morning we went to Whitlocks for their brunch, came home, did some laundry (I’m sorry, but we were desperate. I was down to my last pair of socks, and within two pairs of underwear. I figured it’s better today when none of the businesses are on line, the air’s cool enough that A/C doesn’t need to be on, and the subway’s still down than tomorrow or Tuesday when none of that’s the case), I marked some stuff, and generally just vegged.
Tomorrow’s a whole new day, and they’re saying we may experience rolling blackouts again.
Oh joy.