So I'm sitting at work yesterday at about 4:15 when the power suddenly goes out. Clearly, a sign that it's time to go home early--only there's no power there either. I figured it was a large transformer somewhere, and decided to go run some errands a good distance away, where surely they wouldn't be affected. Luckily, I turned on the radio before going far, and heard them say something about a cop directing traffic at 12th and something. "Wow, all the way downtown! This must be a really big blackout," I think, and look for a good spot to turn around and head home. Then I hear, "And that's so-and-so reporting to us live from Detroit." Oh.
Happily, things are more or less getting back to normal here. Some industrious workers get a huge thanks from me, as we got out power back at about 7 this morning. Power in the Cleveland area is still spotty, so we are very fortunate (at least for now; there's word that some areas may lose power again while repairs are made). The only lingering issue for us is that our water is probably bad, but that's nothing that some boiling can't fix.
Things I'm thankful for:
- Gas stoves: allowing us to cook our perishable food even without power.
- Oil lamps: we were given one as a wedding present, but didn't know what we were going to do with it. Luckily, Laura remembered it, and we enjoyed bright, trouble-free light.
- Traffic cops: the general level of driving-impaired-ness in Cleveland extends to a total lack of comprehension that a dead traffic light means stop. Apparently, most people here think that if they don't see a red light, they can just keep going. Of course, this shouldn't surprise me, since there are quite a few people who think that even if they do see a red light, they can keep going.
- Simple, non-cordless, non-cellular, phone-line-powered, phones: the guy at Radio Shack looked at me like I was from another planet when I asked (after fruitless searching) if they had any non-cordless phones. I explained that I wanted it for power outages, at which point he tried to sell me a cell-phone. Since many cell phones didn't have signals during this whole mess, I felt quite vindicated when we were able to talk to our families.
- Good freezer insulation: after putting perishables in the freezer overnight, they were all still nice and cool in the morning even after almost 15 hours of blackout.
All in all, considering how power-dependent we all are, things went very smoothly for us.
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