Power Outage July 19 / 2013

Article = none, personal experience

   So I'm at Girlfriends place on Friday , sleeping until three in the afternoon (it's 30 degree's out , major heat wave). Finally get up and take a shower ...

   Thunderstorm. Flickering lights . Darkness.
    Now I'm in the dark ... but the shower is still working we still have water. Where's the soap ? where's ... pretty much anything ? It'd hadn't been dark a moment ago. Get out of the shower , which I hadn't finished, visions of slipping on a bar of soap and killing myself and no one finding me for a week dancing in my head.
   Find some diet cola in the fridge left over from last week sit down on my favorite chair and stare at the blank computer screen.
   No power. No computer . No internet.
   Girlfriend is on the phone talking to a friend. In Tagalog. I have no clue what they're saying. Luckily everyone I know is on cell phones these days. Wind with some kind of unlimited local calling is actually cheaper than a land line.
   We talk about the last power outage. Lasted for days. No no  , Girlfriend assures me. That was when some power company in the states blew a gasket and blamed it all on us. All I remember is getting out of work early and endlessly walking around the building while our bosses tried to decide if they were going to send us home or tough it out and hope the power came back sortly. The stars were very pretty that night long ago. Seeing as how there were no lights near by to drown them out.
   Checked the balcony. The sun was still up , and it was quite cloudy, owing to the thunder storm that had most likely knocked out the power.
   Sat down and watched the rain a bit. Girlfriend was glad I was there since the room mates (who now lived in my room while I lived in a broom closet across town that probably still had power and internet where as her place didn't) were off for the weekend. Camping or some strange thing.
   I phoned my sister in toronto. She was on a wind phone too , so wind to wind call , no charge. We chatted for an hour. She was at work but no one else had shown up so she was sitting at her desk feet up on it relaxing. Or so she told me.
   Talked about our dear sweet father , whom her interest in Geneology had turned up. No idea where that is going. Could be a new friend for life, or he might tell us to bugger off and quit bothering him. Not a clue . This isn't a soap opera, and things don't always have a happy ending in real life.
   Then again in most good soap opera's there rarely is a happy ending either. House MD ended with House's best friend having terminal cancer. Greys Anatomy it's almost traditional by now , season nine, to have some disaster strike and kill someone off at the end of the season (end of september we find out if Richard survives or not... I'm betting not , mostly because I read an online artical saying one of the main actors had asked to be written out of the story , and it was Richard webber on the ground getting electrocuted at the end of the season finale. Could be a fake out though.  )
   Why am I meandering on like this ?
   Blonde Sister (the one in Toronto) doesn't like my blog. She says I sound like a crazy man with issues all over the place. I tell her ... the blog is where I vent.  It's where I can vent in private / public without sounding like a crazy man . So , according to her , I sound like a crazy man on my blog instead.
   Aha. Win some lose some. I'll try to keep the ranting down to a minimum.
   But really. The Americans listening in on every phone call, every email, every skype call, and more ,  in the world ? And their president not only refuses to apologize, but see's nothing wrong with it. Everyone does it , he publically states. Who wouldn't want to rant about that. Am I ranting again ? Sorry.
   Girlfriend decides to take me to dinner, her favorite Buffet across town. She's nice enough to even pay for it , though she tells me she's knocking it off the price of the computer I "sold" her and never got paid for. Apparently I'm being paid in the form of whatever T-Shirts and pants she finds on sale at the Sally Anne , and the occassional night out.
   Win some , lose some. I'm keeping my current lap top though. When Ottawa Housing comes through and gets me a place it's becomeing my new Ubuntu machine, since she has my old one and it just sits on a shelf while she uses my previous main computer.
   On the internet they're constantly taking surveys, for marketting purposes, who's using what operating system. Are you an apple user ? A windows , a linux man ? Statisticians want to know so they can sell the information to advertising agencies who can in turn sell it to computer manufacturers. There's a lot of money on the table for junk like that.
   Do I count as a windows guy or a Linux Guy ? I wonder sometimes...since I like to have one of each at all times (when I get a choice in the matter, when Girlfriend hasn't "liberated" one of my machines" )
   We get home and the powers back on. I remember I promised myself I'd write a blog entry about this , and that I would try to keep the ranting down to a minimum.
   We'll see how it goes.