Forty Winks

I give up.

I thought we'd make it this time.  Up to this past Wednesday, we hadn't had a single electrical blackout in our house since November 2016. It looked like we'd get through the entire year of 2017 without an outage - or at least get through this November without one.  Think of it . . . a full year without an outage.

Then we got two outages.

The power went off this past Wednesday night for a moment and then it came back on.  Then it went off for more than a moment, maybe about a minute or so - before going back on again.  Outage number 39 . . . and outage number 40 since November 2009.  Forty winks.

I now officially surrender.  My mother and I will never again have a whole year, calendar or otherwise, without an electrical blackout.   And I'm going to have to get used to resetting the clocks more often than twice a year (due to Daylight Savings Time). 

This past Wednesday afternoon, a severe thunderstorm hit my neighborhood and warranted an official warning from the National Weather Service through 2:15 PM, but the power stayed on, even if the cable service went out for about five minutes.  (We got through more than a full year without a cable outage, at least - one year, one month and one day to be exact, so that ought to count for something.)   So I can't figure out why it would go out momentarily - twice - close to 11:00 PM, long after the storm - and the steady rain it ushered in - had passed.   Maybe it had to do with the 2.6 inches of rain my area got in under ninety minutes that afternoon, which may have compromised things.  Maybe it was a wayward tree branch.  Maybe it was just the electric company's incompetence.

I don't have time for more conjectures, because the forecast calls for it to be rainy and stormy today . . . and to leave it at that would be like saying that Scarlett Johansson has pleasant features.  We're getting a day-long rainfall that could include heavy thunderstorms, and the Storm Prediction Center has already put New Jersey in a severe-thunderstorm risk zone for today.  We were in a marginal-risk zone this past Wednesday, and even the smallest risk turned out to be a big deal.

If there's a silver lining here (and believe me, I know I'm grasping at straws), it's that we are expected to get about an inch of rain over the whole day, not double that and half again in a few hours.  Of course, a heavy thunderstorm could give us extra rain if it hits at the right time, and the ground may still be very saturated from Wednesday's storms, so I think we're in trouble again.  We could lose our electricity again today, and maybe for more than a moment.

It's over.  I no longer have any hope of having uninterrupted electricity for at least a year.  Especially with climate change, which causes the weather that gives us blackouts, in the offing.  And I hope Steve Bannon goes straight to hell for getting Trump to reject the Paris Agreement (more about that later).