Day Six. Damn, Even GOD stopped after six.

[captainsblog]

Edited to add typical picture:



That's from a Toronto paper from over the weekend; the snow's all gone, for the most part, but the trees look pretty much the same as you see here

This morning's score (I think): 140,000 homes restored, 120 still without. An improvement over yesterday. Increasing at an increasing rate. God, get me cold enough and I start remembering trace quantities of calculus.

The official movie of this outage/outrage has got to be Groundhog Day. Every morning, it's the same. Feed the animals, pour hot water into the fish tank, start the gas grill on the patio for coffee, venture out, not find bank of your own brand that's open, take client check (dated, ominously, last Friday) to the in-store branch of his bank, be told it's not good, set up shop at Wegmans, return home, watch utility workers not fixing your house, pray.

If that's the movie, there's also a soundtrack: our neighborhood's become a living set for U2's Rattle and Hum. Rattle, from the sound of chainsaws and front-end loaders and still-crashing branches (it's raining today, the overcast making for a warmer house overnight but also making the making of coffee quite a mess). And hum, from the sounds of the Lucky Ones who acquired generators and are running them, 18 hours a day, to keep their fridges and furnaces and who knows what elses going while the rest of us carry on.

Possibly because I don't have one, I've decided these generators are basically deathtraps with wheels on them. On the one hand, as two more local Darwin Award winners just proved, it is deadly to run a generator indoors, even in an open-doored garage. On the other hand, as the Red Cross will tell you, you're not supposed to run the things outside in rain or snow, either. Given that it's Buffalo and (face it) it's winter, this would seem to rule out about 90 percent of the contingencies not involving having Moses in the back yard to part the waters over his head.

The driving ban finally got lifted. Naturally, our county executive promptly got himself in a car accident. Guess he did need an $80,000 a year patronage czar to drive him around.

The Mets got rained out last night, ending what little chance there was for after-dark entertainment. Plans for today (assuming asshat's check ever DOES get made good) are to find me a better book and an Itty Bitty Book Light so I won't go stir-crazy if tonight's game gets rained out; find someplace to send outbound email from (public wifi's like Wegmans allow Outlook to receive but not send), check on the etiquette involved in bribing utility workers, write snail letters (Annie requested one and will be getting one, wheneverTF the mail gets picked up around here), pray.

Our church never opened since Friday. They were supposed to have had a flu shot clinic on Friday. For the third straight year, it got cancelled. I met one of the Visiting Nurse Service clinic workers in line over here who was supposed to be doing them this week; we decided the clinics are bad luck and next year we're just going to have the churches pass out candy bars. "You could put the vaccine IN the candy bars," she suggested. I decided I like this nurse.

More to come. Hopefully not too damn much more.

Comments

[shinuhana.livejournal.com]

If you don't find a place to send outlook emails from, just use a yahoo or gmail account. You can set the return address to be your normal address and the name to be your normal name. Add a brief line in the beginning of the email explaining your circumstances and make sure your subject line is very specific and personal so they know it's you.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the ideas. Not sure I'm up to changing the return address or any of that. I do have a backup AOL account I use for my court electronic-filing emails, which I'll use for anyone in urgent need of a reply. So far I've just been calling them, availing myself of the fact that, somehow in the midst of all this, we still have all our landline phones working at home.