The Online Photographer

Thunderstorm

That was a bad one! Twenty-six hours without power or water. (My well pump is electric.) Power came back at 6:21 last night.

When I bought it, my house came with a "whole house generator" for blackouts, but it died during a long power problem at Christmastime 2022—many hours of successive brownouts. I wrote about it at the time. Fortunately, right around that time, they were replacing the power lines and the wiring poles (formerly known as "telephone poles") from town to my house and on down the shore road, and we've had relatively few blackouts since then.

I know little about electricity—I'm better with things I can see—but a battery backup for my CPAP has got to be in my future. A reader recommended this one, but the one-star reviews scared me. I need a few extra flashlights too. I have a friend who is a big fan of the type that straps to your forehead.

I got a lot done yesterday during the outage. Picked up my prescriptions and did some other errands, went to two meetings, read my book, did yardwork till the mower ran out of gas and then went and got more gas. Picked up my new shirt from Esther on Tuesday before the thunderstorm, which was very nice. I like Esther, and she did a good job on the shirt. I should have gone out photographing yesterday; I could have done that too.

In the dark was when it got lonely. You don't know how long the blackout's going to last so you can't be profligate with the charge in your devices, including the flashlight.

All's well that ends well
Human beings have many superpowers, and sometimes we're not even aware of them. One of them is "compartmentalizing," which I read about when I read a great long tome about trauma that was very enlightening. Assuming it isn't a real trauma and doesn't leave too deep a scar, when you have a bad experience or are in a bad stretch of time for some reason—recovering from an operation, in jail for 30 days, going through a nasty divorce (I wonder if there's any other kind?) or childbirth, being in an accident that doesn't hurt anyone but totals your car, moving, losing your house but not your life to a fire, enduring a serious dental procedure, whatever—it can completely dominate your life for a while—your thoughts, worries, your whole experience of existence. Maybe you're caught somewhere with little food for a week. While it's front and center in your life it might cause real pain or just be a pain in the butt. But then, when it's over, it's over. We put the bad experience in a box, stick it on the shelf, and move on with our lives. And before we know it, apart from some general impressions which can seem quite superficial in retrospect, we hardly remember what's in the box.

Superpower.

A power outage is a perfect example. It's not the worst sort of suffering, but you do suffer for a while. Usually, though, you're not in it alone, you have a high degree of faith that it will end, and you still have the power, no pun intended, to make the best of some otherwise wasted hours and to take further protective action if need be, like when I spent the night in a motel during the brownouts in 2022. Then it's over, and, after it recedes, it's like it never happened. 

So anyway, all is well. A big frustration that seems little already.

Mike

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