Modern power outage
December 10th, 2009 | Uncategorized
Power’s out, but look! I’m still blogging. Cooked breakfast on th’ woodstove, and have to flush the toilet with water fetched from the brook. But we still have internet access.
Power’s out, but look! I’m still blogging. Cooked breakfast on th’ woodstove, and have to flush the toilet with water fetched from the brook. But we still have internet access.
36 Responses to “Modern power outage”
Good luck! Hope you get electricity back soon.
I remember the first time I had to do something like this (i.e. running on a UPS-backup and candles while the power was out in the rest of the house.)
Does anyone else remember that old joke where little Timmy says: “Poor Grandpa. When he was a kid they didn’t have electricity so he had to watch TV by candle light.”
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. NON!
LATE BREAKING NEWS:
Completely off-topic, but: Tomorrow (Fri, 11Dec) would have been Grace Paley’s 87th birthday.
Vermont Public Radio’s noontime call show “Vermont Edition” just announced that will be playing “an archival recording of Paley reading her story, ‘The Loudest Voice'” on the second half today’s show. (noon EST).
(If you’ve never read/heard this story, you owe it to yourself not to miss it.)
“Vermont Edition” website:
http://www.vpr.net/program_about/84/
VPR streaming:
http://www.vpr.net/listen/stream/
(If you miss it, the show is replayed at 7 this evening,
and should be available on-line tomorrow.)
Hey, glad to see you’ve got Holly’s “local store” feature on your fridge!
And in other off-topic news, did you hear that Editor and Publisher and Kirkus reviews are shutting down? Yikes.
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45&aid=174719
ok, I am really confused. Why does a power outage make the toilet not flush? This some newfangled fancy electric toilet?!
iara#5:
I can’t speak as to Alison’s situation, but for some of us who live out in the sticks, all water is driven by the pump on our property (as opposed to town folks for whom water pressure is provided by th city water mains).
As a result: No electricity, no water flow. Period.
(Also, the current-demand on the pump is typically huge. So even if you have a generate –a necessity of life here in the wilds of Vermont– it still might not be sufficient.)
Gosh, Kirkus Reviews is closing down, and the Los Angeles Times is still publishing. What a sad day.
@NLC… thanks for the clarification, iara wasn’t the only one who was confused!
More thanks here NLC. I was confused too! Let us know when the 21st century is restored to you. Or are you going to go and wash your clothes in the brook and beat them on the rocks? This always sounded fun, if hard work, on a hot summer’s day, but in the depths of winter? Especially when the water’s frozen solid, what did people do?
NLC, etched in the sidewalk cement near my home are the words, “Paley Lives”. I like to think it’s about her.
Kirkus Reviews no more? I hate this friggin’ economy.
Maggie, belated welcome back. Hope you’re healing just fine. Too tipsy to type more. (Hey, it’s freakin’ freezing here, what else am I supposed to do on a day like this? Going to join cats in front of fireplace…)
I’m back! Did anyone miss me? I’m Kate. Kate L. We had a blizzard two days ago, and the daytime high yesterday was 8 F (-13 C), with an overnight low of -7 F (-22 C). My car doors were frozen shut, and the fan on my car heater was frozen, also. Come on, global warming!
Ginjoint! How are you? You haven’t posted in a while and we missed you!
@Kate L: The standard advice we’re given here when car doors/locks are frozen is to pee on them to melt the ice. Maybe you ought to invest in a She-Wee!
Okay, Kate L wins……I thought *I* was cold, but my brain can’t even comprehend the words (letters/numbers/symbols) “-7F”
(yes, yes, I’m in California and have no right to complain about cold, but for us this is nuts! There was snow in the Berkeley hills a couple days ago. yeah, about 4 millimeters of it, but that’s still eventful)
It isn’t very green–but you don’t have a generator? In a rural area? In Vermont?
We had to run off the generator last year for five days after the ice storm. The cable people had to send a crew out to restore the Internet, but that only took four hours.
Of course, only three rooms were powered, but they were the kitchen, my office, and the room with the television (on which we could watch the constant updates about the power). Oh, and the heat pump–don’t want to forget that.
All the neighbors were running off generators for a while. Is this not common elsewhere?
Ian (12) – oh yes….yet another use for a she-wee!!! I am storing up good reasons to get one until it eventually means I have no real choice but to order one. my main concern is that after use it will sit in it’s special little bag for weeks becasue I will forget to get it out and I just know that however hermetically sealed the bag is, my she-wee will always be covered in fluff and biscuit crumbs as most things seem to be once they have been in my bag for a while. has anyone got any experiences of using a she-wee or similar???
Hey Ian! Hope you’re doing well. But…there’s no WAY I would urinate on my car door (!), She-Wee or no. People have gotten way too free with this imagined right to piss anywhere in the great outdoors. Although…I’d like to meet the man who had the guts to whip it out for that use with some of the recent wind chills here, which are -5F(-20C) to -15F(-26C). God help him should he accidentally let his “member” touch the metal lock. *evil snicker*
So what do you think of Brother Edmund’s latest offering?
We were fortunate to avoid the worst of the storm.
And I’m with you, Ginjoint. Unless driven by direst need, I have no desire to pee anywhere except the bathroom.
Anonymous#14:
Again, I can’t speak for Alison, but speaking from a similar situation:
Like you, we (also in Vermont) were without power (or phones or internet-cable) for about four days following a storm last winter. We have a generator, but folks around here tend to use them intermittently during outages. We typically ran ours for a couple hours in the evening, mostly to raise the temperature in the house a bit (we have oil heat, but the blowers, etc, need electricity) and to drive the water pump enough to flush all the toilets, refill the water jugs, etc. (And some comparatively minor things like recharging cellphones, checking e-mail, etc.) In short, most folks find it too expensive –and too noisy!– to run the generator constantly.
OTOH, if you have another source of heat (Alison mentions their woodstove –getting one is on our “someday” short-list) and some way to get liquid water (again, see Alison’s original post) then you could potentially go quite a while without the electricity.
(Concerning heat: Bear in mind that it’s not just an issue of “personal comfort”; after a few days it could easily become an issue of ensuring that the pipes, etc, in the walls don’t freeze and burst!)
Ginjoint,
oh.my.god. I realize that this will put me first in line for Hell, but I love this quote:
“God help him should he accidentally let his “member” touch the metal lock. *evil snicker*”
I’m imagining a scenario much like in that movie “A Christmas Story” (in which the kid gets his tongue stuck to the flagpole because someone has “triple dog dared” him to do it)…….bwahahahahaha….sigh. I amuse myself…
also, imagine having to explain that to the cop/firefighter/neighborhood watch….
@ Antoinette / 17: CITY BOY isn’t Edmund White writing. It’s Edmund White talking, and being transcribed: Anecdote rendered pointless by incoherency. A disappointment.
@NLC (#3)
I inherited Grace Paley’s typing table from her W.11 St apartment (long story), and I use it as a nightstand. I sang Happy Birthday to it (and presumably, to Grace’s writing spirit lurking in the table) this morning.
I can still hear her voice in my head, and I still laugh at how many times she locked herself out of her apartment and “borrowed our window” to scamper from the fire escape along a ledge into her apartment.
The first time she borrowed the window, I was horrified that this middle-aged woman was scooting along a narrow ledge without a railing. Granted, it was only two stories up, but still enough of a fall to break body parts. I was then a twenty-something in good shape, and I offered to climb in her window. She wouldn’t let me. “Oh no, I do this all the time,” she said. And no kidding, she DID do it all the time.
Amazing Grace. The world needs more women like her.
well that is one hell of a Grace Paley anecdote, Hairball. Amazing indeed.
NLC, thanks for explaining the whole water pump thing to everyone.
And dangit! I wish I’d known about UPS backups before! I’ve only used a laptop till recently, so if the power went out I wouldn’t lose anything. But I’ve been working on a desktop, and in Wednesday’s storm I lost at least an hour’s worth of very tedious work. Anyhow, I just ordered a backup battery.
Concerning UPS/battery backup:
Yes, they can be life-savers.
Where I live extensive black-outs (i.e. lasting an hour, etc) are “couple-times a year” events. However, little half-second hiccups –enough to cause my machine to reboot, certainly enough to ruin my day– can typically happen a couple times a month or more.
(Also, there’s a lot of less obvious stuff, like protecting against things like power or voltage surges and/or drops. Again, something that’s more likely out here in the sticks.)
So, yes: Your UPS –like frequent backups– is your friend.
Is solar an option in VT? The technology’s getting ever better. The whole thing sounds like camping only without getting ticks on your butt when you um squat to Do Stuff.
Hope the power came back quickly.
I stand by my right to squat and pee in the outdoors. These days, unfortunately, it mostly happens on the side of the highway. (I’ll take that over nasty gas station restrooms any day.) I never was very femme.
ps Feminista, you see this in today’s NYT?
Illegal Immigrant Students Publicly Take Up a Cause
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/us/11student.html?_r=2&hp
Issue’s gaining momentum, sister!
For lesbo-kitchen who has commented here: I love your blog! I just plugged it on my FB page.
@ Ian (9): people stunk, stunk like nobody’s business. Because it was so terribly impossible to wash yourself and your clothes.
Except in some cultures (e.g., in Japan), I wonder why and what gave them the energy.
Oh, Alison, you are so lucky to have the wood stove! I love them! Do you have the giant cast iron kettle for on top? They are very handy for taking a bath in primitive situations.
Something you may want to consider is installing a hand pump outside. Not too far from the back door, as an example. I know those work wonderfully in the backwood mountains of western Pennsylvania. I can only remember a FEW instances where it froze.
And really, there is nothing quite like breakfast from the wood stove. Or chilli, or pierogies, or minestrone, or pot roast, or a lot of things. I do believe that if I had a wood stove I would use it all the time. Hhhhmmm… something to look for in the next living space…
@hairball, do you happen to know the address? i lived on west 11th street for two years, next to the tiny little jewish cemetery and charles ives.
@cybercita (#31)
126 W. 11 St, between 6th and 7th Ave. Next to PS 41, across from Ray’s Pizza, down the block from St. Vincent’s Hospital.
If you stand in front of the building, it says Unadilla over the doorway where the columns are. Grace’s windows were the ones on the second floor closest to the school. Ours were right next to hers.
You lived on the other side of 6th Ave, between 5th and 6th Ave, closer to the second cemetery of Congregation Shearith Israel, the Portuguese Sephardic synagogue. The third cemetery is on W. 21 St, between 6th and 7th Ave. The first cemetery is at Chatham Square, in Chinatown.
Funny that you mentioned the cemetery. When I was given directions to the apartment where my (future) partner lived, they included a reference to the cemetery. I mentioned that I knew where the third cemetery was, and we both wondered aloud where the first cemetery was located. One of our first dates involved us reseaching this (in the pre-Internet and pre-Google era of the 1970s, this required a trip to the library), and then taking a subway trip and finding it by walking around Chinatown. Good memories.
@Mona (15) Yep, used a She-pee at Glastonbury Festival a few years ago. Shee-pee were promoting them, and had built a female urinal. It was a strange experience – a load of women standing next to each other at the trough, butt cheeks exposed. Everyone ‘froze’ until one woman let go, and that was it, one after the other we managed to relieve ourselves. Cue much laughter.
@HOH, i walk down that street quite often, since my office is on 14th st and i’m addicted to ray’s pizza. i’ll have to stop by there tomorrow and take a look.
@cybercita (#34)
I haven’t eaten at Ray’s in years. It’s ok pizza if you’re really into a ridiculous pile of cheese on your slice, but the dough is too gummy for my taste.
If I’m going to eat pizza in that neighborhood, I’ll walk down the block toward 7th and Greenwich Aves and go to Two Boots.
I’ve been away from the blog for a few weeks, and boy is it great to see Ian and cybercita and Maggie and Hairball and Grace Paley. Great blog. I was eating bacon in Chicago on Sunday and thinking of you all.
LOVE this blog!