Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Ah, timing. Internet came back (it had failed moments after I posted my wee-hours entry yesterday morning), but just after I started writing this entry, the inverter started screaming (electricity is still off). My plan was to write about yesterday and do a quick skim of my flist, but not stay online too long because of not wanting to have to carry the battery back out to the car to recharge it. I didn't even get that far. So the car is running and the deep cycle battery is charging, as I compose this to upload and post a while later. (I got online about 17:20 and was only on for a few minutes.) Since the battery's open-circuit voltage was a smidgen over 12 V, I'm guessing this was the "Hey, your car might not start if you run the battery down any farther" alarm, not the "I'm dyin' here from low voltage and you might damage your battery" alarm, but it was loud and annoying. (And come to think of it, I should've checked the voltage with the inverter running, as well. Whoops.)

Since this is a deep-cycle battery, and I'm not using it to start my car (except as a side effect, from leaving it plugged into the cigarette lighter after it's charged, where is might assist the car's own battery maybe), running it all the way down to 10 V or so should be okay, right? I wonder whether it's worth opening up the inverter to try to figure out how to disable the alarm. (Ideally I'd want to just change the low-water-mark for the alarm, not disable it entirely, but of the two options, I'm much more likely to be able to figure out how to do one than the other.)

And yes, I did consider just running the inverter anyhow despite the alarm. But the alarm is really, really loud.

I did way too much yesterday, and I'm hurting from it now. Those of you who follow me on Twitter can skip this next bit, but for the entertainment of the rest of you, here's my yesterday and a little of the night before:

So yes, I spent most of yesterday Picking Up Sticks and playing low-tech / fuel-poor cook. And watching clouds. And noticing that it got considerably warmer than the last weather forecast I'd seen had said it would. (In addition to that, I also put back all the stuff that belongs on Mom's porch or at the side of the house, that had been shoved into the garage on Friday.) I keep looking at that description and thinking, "Gee, it doesn't sound like much," (damned fibromyalgia), but at the same time, it was work.

Anyhow, it took me a while to get a few thumb-sized sticks dry enough to catch, but once I got the fire started in Mom's charcoal grill, I was able to keep it going. When I cook over a wood fire, I'm used to doing so on a campfire built with sold-as-firewood wood, which is all in big enough pieces that you don't have to worry about it all getting used up while you're holding a skillet over it and don't have a hand free for adding more fuel. Yesterday was interesting, on account of having to feed the fire constantly. Interesting and tiring. But hey, I got me grilled cheese and my roasted veggies over a fire I made from what the hurricane knocked down in Mom's yard ... uh, and the yard next door, where I had to go for the thicker pieces of wood. Considering that the last few years we haven't had enough spare room in camp to really build a campfire at Pennsic, it was nice to get a bit of practice at wood-fire cooking again.

Using charcoal instead of windfall wood would've been much, much easier, though less interesting, if Mom had had any charcoal.

Today, I settled for coffee using water heated over Sterno. I ache too much to go collect more wood and get the fire started again. (I did stack a pile of kindling and a couple of maybe-big-enough-to-boil-water pieces of windfall next to the grill, so I could start a fire without picking up more sticks, but it wouldn't burn for very long with just what I have left over from yesterday.)

While Sheepie and I were talking on the phone last night, she checked my brother's Facebook status for me, and confirmed that (a) he got through the hurricane okay, and (b) his trailer was still there today when he left his concrete shelter (a hotel, I think) to go check. I haven't heard yet whether his trailer stayed dry or not, but things pretty much sound okay in that direction. It sounds like my sister's house is fine too. My other brother lost power, and headed to his in-laws' house yesterday; he said that he had to detour around fallen-tree-blocked streets twice ... and as I recall, he only had to go about a mile. Here, there's not much tree damage -- lots and lots and lots of leaves and sticks, but I did have to search a while to find pieces large enough to cook over. One big limb down, which I used part of, but the really useful looking parts of that one were too thick to break (and there's no axe here, and I got impatient with the hand saw), so 95% was either too thin or too thick to be convenient. (With an axe, or even maybe a hatchet, the "too thick to be convenient" threshold would have been very, very different.)

... I heard a caller to a radio show in Baltimore complaining that BGE shouldn't be so slow to restore power, since he didn't see much damage from his porch (just like here at Mom's house). Radio host very patiently explained to the dude that just because there was no tree knocked over on his block didn't mean that no trees fell over on any power lines anywhere.

The last time I remember being without electricity in a situation where authiorities were saying it could be days and days before everyone's electricity was restored, it was during an ice storm. I have no idea whether that makes a difference to how quickly repairs are made, but I have to imagine that it makes the repair work more comfortable to have weather like yesterday and today for the repair crews to do their work in.

Once the deep-cycle battery is charged, I'm going to use the Internet in batch mode for a while, I think: download email to read, upload already composed mail and blog posts, grab a page worth of flist in a browser window, disconnect again, and repeat several hours later or the next day, rather than surfing until the inverter starts screaming again. Wiith any luck, power will be restored tomorrow anyhow, and the world will be back to normal. [knocks wood]

Professor Pau: "Are you saying he's dead?"

Kathryn Flinders: "Deader than disco."

Ennesby: "Disco has come back in eleven different forms in the last 300 years alone. Pick a less foreboding comparison, maybe?"

From the science-fiction webcomic Schlock Mercenary by Howard Tayler, 2011-08-18

[Still no electricity here. Whee.]

I'm wondering whether there's a formal name for a particular type of cognitive glitch -- the one where someone says, "Because the precautions we took were effective and there was no disaster as a result, the precautions were obviously unneeded in the first place and we were wrong to bother tiwth them". There's a closely related one that goes, "Since the worst-case didn't happen after all, it was a waste to have been prepared for it just in case, and next time we shouldn't bother."

One of the first things I read online after the Virginia earthquake was a bit of snark froms someone wondering how long it would take for the RWEC to find a way to blame the quake on Obama. Before the hurricane had quite arrived, my mother remarked that "they'll find some way to blame the hurricane on Obama".

After the hurricane, lacking electricity, Mom's been listening to a wee, battery-powered radio that doesn't work very well. Trying to find stations it'll actually pick up, she's found a Fox Radio Network station, a station apparently somehow connected to the Washington Times, and some Baltimore station with a lot of call-in shows. I've not been listening very much, but occasionally I'm in the same room for a spell and catch bits of it. There was the fellow I mentioned in my previous entry, who was convinced that because no trees were down in his own yard, therefore there couldn't be enough damage elsewhere for BGE to be taking so long to get everything repaired. And there was someone (uh, Sean Hannity, I think, not sure) going on about how all the warnings, and evacuations, and pre-storm advice were all part of some sort of conspiracy (I never did manage to figure out the alleged purpose of the conspiracy that involved trying to get people out of flood-prone areas), and since Irene diminished in intensity just before it reached us and the flooding wasn't as bad as the worst-case predictions, and because so few people had been killed or needed to be rescued, "obviously" all that fuss ahead of time was a completely pointless waste or time and resources except for however it served the left-wing conspiracy. Let's skip over the idea that there might have been more people needing to be rescued if lots of people had not gotten out of the way, eh?

And in the next breath, he went on about how weather predictions are so very unreliable (so, uh, obviously we only need to be prepared for the least severe end of the forecast because it's never ever worse than they expect when they get it wrong?), and how this means Global Warming is completely bogus (gee, sing along everybody, and let's confuse climate and weather Yet Again -- you all know the chorus by now, since we've heard it so many times).

(Hi did concede that the storm took the exact center of the predicted track, and only the intensity was different from what we'd all been warned about.)

In addition to the stuff that just didn't make sense, and the lies that were debunked weeks or months ago about various topics (repeated today as though they were well established, not outright debunked), we've got bits like this where he seemed to be refuting himself. "They can't predict the weather with certainty; therefore we can always predict that it won't be as bad as they predict, and being prepared in case it's ever worse than expected is a Waste of Taxpayer Dollars (and part of some conspiracy to get you out of town for a night)."

(Gosh, when Maddow, Olbermann, or O'Donnel says something later determined to have been false, they have to apologize for it and set the record straight. This afternoon I was hearing things that the speaker had to have known were lies, since they'd been investigated and refuted weeks ago.)

Or maybe the implied claim is that meteorologists can't predict the weather but political opinionators can do so perfectly?

And you know that if the various governors had not taken precautions, ans Obama jad not urged folks to take their own precautions, and Irene had gained intensity instead of diminishing, or had take the absolute worst-case path, and ten times as many people had died, these same haters would be blaming them for not having the foresight to prepare.

Mom thinks these radio people are "funny" because their bias is so laughably transparent and their distortions so extreme. I'd find them a lot funnier if I didn't know people who take such clowns seriously, believe they'ew hearing gospel, and vote accordingly. I might find them funny if I didn't know that some of those distortions were in fact outright lies, not just very insistent spin. I could not manage to be amused, I'm afraid.

Still no power at Mom's house. (And computer problems at mine.) Went home to take advantage of decent weather and not much else on the agenda, and get a little more work done on my living room. Well, my computers-and--storage-and-randomness room that's meant to be a living room music room (except for the part that's supposed to stay a server room). There's electricity there, so I charged stuff while we worked. On the car radio, WTOP was saying that much of the still-dark parts of MD should be lit again by tonight ... but also something about some areas east of I-95 maybe being dark until Friday. So hey, maybe the lights'll come on in a few hours, maybe in a few days.

Trying to chew through email backlog offline, but laptop batteries don't last as long as I'd like. (Partly just the nature of laptops; partly the fact that the battery in the Powerbook is Godknowshowold. Not sure what the XO's excuse is.)

My house was, of course, way too hot. But the outdoor temperature was so unusually reasonable, that the house did actually cool a little with some windows open -- yay. It cooled off just about the time I realized that even though I wasn't at the falling-down stage yet, I had definitely reached the "put attendance at tomorrow's rehearsal in jeopardy if I push any more" stage. And we've got a gig coming up on the weekend, so rehearsal tomorrow is kinda important. So we stopped then, and drove back to the candle-lit zone (where her dog and my cat waited) for the night.

Gonna see how much a hot shower helps these pains in my back and right shoulder (glad Mom's water heater, like most in the area, runs on gas), then do more reading until I see low-battery warnings.