In The Dark

      A string of bad thunderstorms rolled across Indiana late yesterday afternoon, catching me on a break at a bookstore near work.  About five o'clock, the power went out.

     Work has a generator and an automatic transfer switch.  The bookstore, not so much.  The traffic lights, not so much.

     I was near the North Campus, where various street projects have snarled the already-busy traffic.  From the bookstore, I could see the intersection I'd need to cross to get back, a six-crossing-six (counting left turn lanes) with a two-block backup in at least two directions.  The intersection kept jamming up, minor fender-benders and gridlocks as drivers tried to sort out how to accommodate the left-turn lanes when a dead stoplight defaults for a four-way stop.  In theory, right-of-way precesses around the intersection counterclockwise, a system the works well enough when a pair of two-lane roads meet.  If no one is turning left, it often devolves into taking turns, alternating the north-south and east-west (etc.) streets.  The multi-lane version with left-turn lanes can work that way, too, but it's complicated and all it takes is one driver getting out of sync or in a hurry to bollix the whole thing.

     So I waited, texting Tam at home, nearly seven miles away: "STAYING SAFE?"
Tam: "OK.  POWER IS OUT HERE."  That was about 5:15.  I checked the power and light company's outage map, and they showed small outages everywhere, with a few bigger ones indicated.

     By six o'clock, power was still out and the bookstore decided to close.  They let the remaining customers put our selections on hold and gently shooed us out.  The big intersection was still a mess.  The store is in a large strip center and I scouted around the parking lot in my car: the way to the south, where the street narrows to a lane each direction, was moving pretty well, so I took it, aiming home.  A mile down the road, the traffic light was out, and churning through it was slow.  Two miles on, the light was working, and I was able to turn.  Next stoplight was out, but with lighter traffic, going smoothly.  From there on, including crossing Meridian Street, a major north-south artery, all the traffic lights were okay, businesses open, houses lit up -- until I got to my neighborhood.

     I drove down in front of my house.  The porch light was out: no power.  That meant the garage door opener would be out, so I parked in front and went in.  I had leftovers in the freezer, and with a gas range, that meant it was time to use them up.  Not too long after I arrived, there was an ugly gazonking noise from the direction of the substation a few block away, surely a sign of progress.  I made dinner and Tam and I watched the little battery TV in the kitchen while we ate, thinking the lights would come back on at any moment.  Nope.

     We cleared away the TV trays and dishes as best we could; by then it was getting dark enough we broke out flashlights.  I plugged my phone into the fat backup battery I keep charged up just in case, and went to bed with a book on my iPad.

     It wasn't a good night for sleep.  I kept waking up in the dark, wondering where I was and remembering, lighting the iPad back up and reading until I dozed off.  Eleven p.m., midnight, two a.m., three....  At four-thirty, I was startled awake by eye-searing brightness through closed eyelids!  I'd apparently flipped the switch for the overhead light at some point, and, the power being out, left it on.  That sixty-Watt light might as well have been a flashbulb.  I got up, turned it off, wandered out to the kitchen in time to see the light in the garage go out, went out and checked that the garage door was down, and went back to bed.

     Almost twelve hours without power.  Everything in the fridge is inedible except for Tam's soft drinks. my peanut butter cups, the UHT milk I keep in there because it's better cold and maybe the oranges.  I don't know about the contents of the freezer but I don't feel like trusting to luck.  Trash day is tomorrow and it's all going.

     We have had worse.  I think the power was out for nearly three days after the flooding Spring storms shortly after I moved in, but it hasn't been that bad since.