Well, as many of you know, we had a major power outage today. I am sure that just about everyone in our reading area was affected in one way or another, even our Canadian readers, as the power outage hit from Detroit through Ohio all the way out to Boston and north through Ottawa, Toronto and North Bay. I went to my parent’s house around 4:00 pm before the outage struck and Dominica was working at home on some real estate stuff. When I walked in the door at my parent’s, I heard the telephone in the kitchen kick back on. So I asked if the power had been out and dad said that he guessed that it must have but he was working on his laptop in his office and hadn’t noticed anything. Then he said that there must be a brown-out because he could hear his fans slowing down. But the power came right back up and we didn’t have any additional problems. However, my cell phone stopped working. I tried to call Min at home and her cell phone wasn’t working either (we still don’t have any other phone line at the house.) I was at my parent’s house to do some work online so I hopped online and got to work. After a while, Arti called and left me a message, because he wasn’t able to get through, telling me that all the cell phones seemed to be down and that there was a major black-out going on all over the northeast. But at this point I still wasn’t able to make outgoing calls on my cell. Then I called Ingram Micro in Buffalo and my account representative out there told me that they were working in the dark and that there were tons of people in NYC and Toronto panicking because they were afraid that it was a terrorist attack. Dominica got through to me shortly thereafter and said that the power was out in Geneseo. So she drove over to my parent’s house so that she would have some power too. She was working on invitations for the wedding (no, they aren’t done yet.)
Geneseo proper ended up getting power restored around 10:30 pm and Pavilion never lost power. But Lima Road, where the Llamas now live, didn’t get power restored at all. So I got to go to sleep in the dark and quiet of a block without power.
We finally gave up on getting the SDSL line into the house all on its own so we ordered a regular Frontier telephone line. We will have that installed next Wednesday. That way, we can at very least dial-up and get email and do the basics online and order pizza and stuff. In the long run, we are going to use the line for my parent’s to dial into to get Internet access and for emergencies like when the power goes out (I swear, it never goes out around here!) So, maybe that will get out SDSL line rolling a little bit faster.
Min is enjoying her new job at the Conesus Lake Hotel. Tonight is her second night and it is really hot there because of the state of emergency not allowing unnecessary air conditioning. So I brought her some fans at work so that she could keep herself a little bit cooler.
My mom had an MRI today that she was in the middle of when the power went off at Highland Hospital. But the incompetent idiots at the hospital let her oxygen tank run out while she was in the middle of the MRI because it didn’t occur to them, apparently, that tanks have a limited supply and that MRI’s take a while.