Our city has a reverse-911 system, and so, this morning, the robo-calls began.
Treat all intersections as a four-way stop. And avoid driving!
I got up, wondered, got in the shower anyway, planning to make it very brief just in case, and–Richard knocked on the bathroom door: It’s the city (another robo-call), to say, Don’t take showers!
Rinsing as fast as I can!
And it made me think once again how much water is my insulin. Since the colectomy I can’t absorb a lot of it anymore and I have to constantly replace what the body is resisting. Come to think of it, we hadn’t replaced the emergency water in the outside earthquake-preparedness containers in years. Ick.
No ‘Net here. Even the landline didn’t work, except for the 25-year-old AT&T desktop that drew its power from the phone line. The ones with the recharging bases kept telling incoming callers the line was busy, while the cell phones were iffy. Ham radios won the day–John had his on, monitoring in case the Red Cross should need him. Meantime, the city called Richard in to help run the emergency communications center. He’d gotten his ham license after his aunt’s house had been a half mile from the Loma Prieta epicenter in ’89.
(Okay, the funny part of his coming in is that they had everybody wear these vivid yellow vests so everybody would know who was who/doing what. When he got home, I tried his on–it fit me. Note that I am 15″ shorter and a whole lot smaller around than he is. Yeah, oops.)
Michelle had to take the car into work, because she sure couldn’t work from home today, but at least the traffic lights worked most of the way in that direction. I wrapped up with my knitting in much-needed blankets created by the hands of my wonderful friends; John curled up with a good old-fashioned book.
And every now and then, we opened the fridge.
Backing up a bit–last fall, our friend Ken sent an email: there was a grand opening special that included this type of generator at this price. Richard looked it up, went, wow, that’s better than I ever expected to get for that much, and we snagged the last one. It had bothered him a long time that we didn’t have one, and now we finally would.
So now we’ve tried it out. It was far quieter than I’d expected. The fridge and freezer were good to go.
It was the dumb little things that kept tripping me up; I wanted a mug of hot cocoa fiercely in that cold, to the point even of debating moving the big microwave out of the kitchen and wrestling it into the middle of the family room floor where the cord could reach the generator’s plug-in. (The generator itself was safely outside.) Maybe John could strong-arm it for me? But it seemed like a really bad idea all around and we voted against it. Don’t overload that thing. He admitted he’d checked out the Starbucks when he’d gone for gas to power the thing, but they were closed down–no hot chocolate there, and you just didn’t want to be on the road for dumb stuff.
And then, like I say, the car went (carefully) off with Michelle anyway.
One commentator I read allowed as how everybody in town had taken the day off to enjoy the warm California sun, and I thought, ?! Where are you typing THAT from!? Okay, granted, compared to, say, DC’s snowmaggedon, but, it was in the low 50’s this morning.
But all of this is just noise, and stupid noise at that, compared to what others are going through that they’ll never be able to turn on the lights again and have it just be over with. To the folks at Tesla Motors, makers of my dream electric car, and your families–our whole city grieves with you in your losses.
And marvels at the skill and care of that pilot in landing on that crowded street with only one wing left, in such a way that despite all the people present in that neighborhood, somehow nobody on the ground was hurt. You knew you couldn’t save yourselves, but you did everything you could and so you saved everybody else.