Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

*grumble*

The electricity went out just before 1:00 this morning. It wasn't off too terribly long, but my LAN is a bit persnickety to reboot (for one thing, there's a machine that needs to boot first, then another needs to be brought up and a bunch of stuff that doesn't initialize correctly yet has to be started by hand, then the first one gets rebooted, after which I can start the other machines -- you can tell this isn't something I do often), and since my UPS died, I worry about filesystem corruption when the lights go out. Well no sooner had I gotten everything running again and set the VCR clock, when the power went out again.

There were no thunderstorms near enough for me to hear, and what rain we did get fell so softly I couldn't hear it unless I stood by an open window. (I don't know about the weather on the entire path from the nearest generating plant to my house, of course.) I don't know what happened, and lacking nine D-cell batteries for the portably telly, I was cut off from useful news reports. The power stayed off until afternoon, long enough for the ice cubes in my freezer to round their edges and flatten their bottoms, but not long enough to entirely stop being ice-cube shaped. I'm guessing that the food in the freezer is probably okay, but I'm concerned about the stuff that was in the fridge section. Ifwhen my antihistamine kicks in, I'll start sniffing stuff.

I am annoyed. Not necessarily at BGE (the local power company) since I have no way of knowing whether this was one of those unavoidable delays due to freakish damage, but definitely feeling snarly at the universe. It's not like I'd just been to the grocery store and filled up the fridge, but money is tight enough for me to feel upset about any food going bad ... and I felt cut off all morning and the first part of the afternoon (I'm only just now back up and running) ... and my special Memorial Day QotD is getting posted late ... and I'm just feeling all growly and snarly in general. An awful lot of my to-do list requires electricity. (And much of the rest requires light, and I didn't feel like trying to juggle enough candles at once when it was still dark. Actually, with the weather today, the house has been pretty dark even since sunup.)

But I did find out what the funny/bad smell in the house was. (I didn't think I'd let the dishes sit that long...) Perrine finally did kill a mouse that she caught. And she left it tucked neatly in between some of her other toys where I didn't notice it until I reached down to pick one up to throw it for her and found a well-dead mouse in my hand. Ewwww. I think there's another one I haven't found yet.

"To be asked to die for your country is grand and horrible. To be asked to die and be forgotten because for someone to remember you hurts the party in power is monsterous." -- badmagic, 2004-04-30

For my non-US readers: today we celebrate Memorial Day.

I just heard an ad on the radio for a store selling pet fish and aquarium supplies, followed by an ad for a restaurant touting its seafood buffet.