Unplanned pause

Two beautiful flowers, eh? I bought this peace lily something like six years ago, and it was in bloom at the time. It hasn’t bloomed since, but now all the sudden it has, with one lone, brave flower stalk. I take that as a good omen of, well, something or other. Because I can. 😉

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Jul 22, 2018 at 8:23pm PDT

Today there was a power outage, apparently so they could do some electrical work for the new subdivision being built near our house. There was no warning of any kind, and, since I was planning on doing things that required electricity, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself. The photo above is one thing I came up with, when I was becoming thoroughly bored.

The day started in a perfectly ordinary way. I put on a load of washing, did some stuff on my computer, and planned other mini-projects before the main project of the day, working on organising the garage.

About 12:30, I decided to have lunch before I took care of the load of washing I’d done and put on another one. So, I went upstairs and made myself some scrambled eggs in the microwave. I went and changed the bedding so I could take that down to the laundry, and then I headed downstairs.

I took the washing out of the washer and put it in the dryer, but I held off starting it while I hung up shirts that I air dry. I went back to the dryer and turned on the power: Nothing happened. I turned off the power at the wall, turned it back on, and still nothing. How could it suddenly fail like that? And then I realised the power must be off. I flicked the nearby light switch and nothing happened. I walked a little farther and realised my computer wasn’t running. This was just past 1pm.

I went upstairs where it was really quiet and tried to figure out what to do. I knew that without electric light, it would be too dark in the garage, and it was a bit too cold to open the overhead doors.

So, I found some “busy work” projects: I took the rubbish and recycling outside, cleaned out the catbox, tidied a little, but I didn’t want to start a bigger project because I had no idea how long the power would be out.

I surfed the web on my phone, using cellphone data, since our computer network was off. Then I stopped. There was a lot of that. I was literally wandering around the house and saw the plant blooming and decided to take a photo, but there aren’t that many Instagram photos with me in them, so the result is above (one of several I tried—I had time to fill, after all).

The power came on again around 3:30pm. This was particularly good because I started dinner around 4. And that was my weird day.

I was really annoyed that they’d shut off the power with no warning whatsoever (though because it was local, we at least had water, even though I couldn't make a coffee). It derailed my entire day, and I could easily have planned around that if I’d known. This was the third unannounced power outage since the work on the subdivision began, and this was among the longest ones (of course, not counting the one they warned us about last month, or another announced one months earlier that I didn’t blog about).

This is, of course, an unimportant problem. It didn’t endanger my life, health, or livelihood (blogging and such doesn’t count, since I don’t get any money for that), and was just an annoying inconvenience. If it happens again—and it may for all I know—I’ll at least have a few more ideas now. I just hope there’s a flower or something else to photograph if it does.

Update August 20, 2018: I've blogged about how I make scrambled eggs in the microwave in reply to Roger Green's comment to this post.