A “severe thunderstorm” has passed by and severed our connection with the power grid. I was putting the final touches on an e-mail on the desktop computer when the lights went out and all my carefully constructed words were reduced to a pile of 1's and 0's back in the old bit bucket. Sigh. Will I ever be able to construct them into anything close to the masterpiece I lost? Ok, it was just a simple response to a friend asking about strategies for purchasing airfare on the internet. Maybe I can remember my main points. Still, it’s sad to lose words that have been strung together with care. I’ve had much greater disasters involving computers and writing projects, but even small ones bring some measure of loss.
So here I am on my laptop with 2:21 hours of battery power, which ought to get me into the territory of “reasonable” bedtime. I have an old-fashioned oil lamp lit to soften the contrast between the laptop screen on its lowest brightness setting and the darkness of a house with no power on a rainy night.
The possibilities for evening activities without power are surprisingly limited. What did people do in the days before oil was found to be useful? More, what did we do during evening power outages before the laptop purchase? I suppose I should be playing games with someone. I can’t remember the last time game-playing was at the top of my list of preferred activities. My husband and I discovered early in our relationship that we would remain friends much longer if we never played games with each other. It's not something I particularly miss.
Power outages are interesting revelations of how strong habits can be. No matter how many light switches I flip without any light being produced, I continue to reach out and flip them periodically as I move from room to room. At some level I always expect the next one to work and am disappointed anew when it doesn't.
On the other hand, I’m always surprised that the piano works. The stereo doesn’t. The television doesn’t. The computers don’t. Nor the refrigerator, microwave, or answering machine. The phone on the wall works, but not the cordless phones. The flashlights work but only until their batteries are dead. The portable radio telling us of local storm damage also has limited battery life. My lamp will run out of oil eventually if I leave it on. We have running water but only until the pressure tank is empty. But the piano simply works – no batteries, no electricity, no time limit. It’s a purely mechanical appliance. I don’t know why, but this amazes me. I might even play it if it if my husband weren’t choosing sleep as his way to while away the hours of darkness and the piano weren’t so badly in need of tuning. It finally has reached the point where I called the piano tuner last week. He will be here Tuesday morning. The power will surely be back on long before then, but it doesn’t matter. He starts with an old-fashioned tuning fork and does the whole thing by ear. No external power source needed.
So even in the dark I could be making thunderous music right here in our livingroom without draining power from anything but my own fingers and arms. I wonder what else we could do mechanically if electricity weren’t so convenient? We may never know unless the world forces us to quit using up the earth’s resources and melting the polar ice-cap with our insatiable appetite for electric power.
The Children’s Museum at Indianapolis used to have a stationary bike that generated electricity. It took sustained, high-energy pedaling to turn on a lightbulb and I never managed to get the small television turned on. Just think what it would do to alleviate America’s obesity problem if every television were powered by pedaling. Families could get additional pedals and share the load for extended times of viewing or for a bigger screen.
Our kitchens could be peddle-powered, too. We could put a hot dog in the microwave and pedal like mad until the end burst open. I wonder if we would break even calorie-wise on that deal.
Meanwhile, it has been almost two hours since the lights went out. I can save this but I can’t post. I hear snoring from the sleep-it-off half of the household. It might be time to make sure all the light switches are in the “off” position, blow out the lamp, and call it a night.
Wait ... there’s a hardly-used modem in this laptop. The phone line is live. Yes, I think I can post if I can find my way through the darkness to an appropriate phone jack. THEN I’ll call it a night.
Enjoy your electricity, dear readers. Hopefully, the power outage is over as you read this. There have been a couple of hopeful flickers and I’m confident that our faithful linemen will prevail.
No comments:
Post a Comment