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It’s a good thing Christmas was Monday (and that it lasted only one day), because the last two days would have been a baaaaad time to host a party. Yesterday it rained steadily all day, hard at times, and my driveway was mostly underwater. Worse, the walkway from the drive to the house was a big puddle. How wonderful it would have been for everyone in the family to have to trek through that slop.
And so we come to today. The rain stopped, and the sky was clear. The sky was clear because the wind blew everything out of it. It was howling from the time it woke me up early this morning (grrrr) to the middle of the afternoon, when it eased up some. Soon after I got up I heard a crash on the back porch. I looked out and saw that the ceramic thermometer was in several pieces.
In a way, that’s okay, because it never showed the correct temperature. According to its dial, it was always 38ºF. Still, it was a nice decorative piece. Now it’s trash (although after Christmas I have no room in either my garbage can or my recycle container).
That wasn’t the worst of it, though. The lights flickered once as a warning, and then I lost all power. Although I can barely afford to miss any work time right now, I was ready to write off the day until it all came back a few minutes later. And then, as soon as I had the computer rebooted and all the clocks reset, the power went off again.
It was like that all morning and most of the afternoon. Sometimes it would go off for a few seconds, sometimes for a few minutes. Exercising either super-sized hopefulness or astonishing stupidity, I reset the clocks every time. There’s one on the microwave, one on the coffee maker, one on the clock radio by my bed, one on the phone, and one big one in the middle of the living room. The VCR clock resets itself automatically. I’m keeping that VCR, even though I hardly use it any more.
It was a little hard to get through the day, but at least I felt better, having slept for almost six straight hours last night. It’s incredible what a little sleep can do. And it’s amazing how much easier sleep comes when you haven’t had any for about 72 hours. I’m still a little drained, but I can’t imagine how I would have coped with the outage if not for those few hours of sleep.
On top of everything else, I was trying to do the payroll, having received the time cards via fax just before noon. This was the day the checks were supposed to be mailed, so you can imagine how frustrating it is to have to wait for the computer to reboot and reload and open programs a dozen times in one day. Oh, didn’t I mention that? It was at least ten or twelve times that the power went out and came back on today. Fun times. | 
