Nice to be back in the 21st century with electricity again. When my cell service went out this morning, on top of the power outage, I began to feel like Tom Hanks in Cast Away.
Open Thread
by John Cole| 79 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
by John Cole| 79 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Nice to be back in the 21st century with electricity again. When my cell service went out this morning, on top of the power outage, I began to feel like Tom Hanks in Cast Away.
Comments are closed.
Goblue72
Wilson!!!!!
ArchTeryx
It wasn’t quite THAT bad, I’d hope. The worst part of his ordeal was that he was totally cut off from other people!
Though I bet it was one incredibly sweaty ordeal for that 24 or so hours. :P
jl
I suggest Cole build a treadmill hooked up to a generator. Add Rosie when she has excess energy. Might be enough to power something. On other hand, being a JR terror dog, she might get over enthusiastic and blow up the grid.
So, probably should check out the possibilities for disaster before rigging that up.
jharp
Why the fuck does it take so long to get power restored and why does it seem to go out far more often than it used to.
One would almost be led to believe that we’re not updating our grid to keep it from breaking down.
Violet
Glad you are back online. Nothing like being without power and phone to realize how dependent you are on them. We can live without them, but our lives are not set up that way, so losing them is challenging.
cathyx
It feels like you guys who lost power are living in the 20th century again. I can’t remember the last time I lost it.
I hope I didn’t just jinx myself.
Violet
@jharp: Electrical grids can’t fail; they can only be failed.
SiubhanDuinne
Please tell us about TunchLilyRosie and the storm and power outage. I’m sure there are some fine stories that need sharing.
ImNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
Power is off again here in my Northern Virginia neighborhood. The storms started around 11pm last night. We had 2 hours of power around 4:30 pm today, but then it went out again.
Thank goodness for this 3G iPad – when the network isn’t overloaded…
Hang in there, everyone.
Cheers,
Scott.
becca
@cathyx: I lost it a long time ago.
MikeJ
@becca: I lost it at the movies.
TBogg
If things got really bad, you could feed on Tunch until early October.
jl
@TBogg:
Tunch has hiw own disaster plans too, you know.
cathyx
@TBogg: But it’s very fatty meat, not too healthy.
Anibundel
the Verizon cell phone towers going down on top of the power outage gave this morning a bit of an apocalyptic feel. We traveled to four shopping centers before we could find anywhere that would sell us coffee. Finally found a dark 711–cash only–that was soldiering on despite conditions. They didn’t have hot coffee, but had cold Starbucks bottles that were priced to move before they went bad. Since the cash registers were electric and wouldn’t open, they were operating out of those single slice pizza boxes, each one with a different bill/coin in it.
On another note–does nobody read the driving manuals?! Failed traffic lights are a FOUR WAY STOP. The inability of humanity to handle this simple rule does not give me hope for went we have a true disaster on our hands.
cathyx
@jl: You mean feed on John?
Raven
My in-laws in the Appommattox-Lynchburg metroplex have been having a difficult time. 93 year old aunt Emma lost power on her farm and they are struggling to get it restored. All that and they got zero rain with the storm.
Violet
@Anibundel: In every hurricane I’ve been through, and subsequent long term power outage, land lines have been the one thing that have continued to work. You have to have the kind of phone that plugs directly into the wall and doesn’t run on electricity, but you can still have a phone. Did any landlines continue to work?
Sal
Kind of amusing that a self described semi-misanthrope like John got the vapors after a couple days without power and a half day without a cell phone. What would your old drill sergeant say, soldier!?
elftx
my son and his gf are in DC for a weekend vacation..they said it rained “hardcore” last night so stayed in after dinner but apparently had no idea what actually occurred …silly them lol
just saw this …something included with the health care ruling..lmao no wonder those asshats have been shitting bricks
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304830704577496580986417316.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
quannlace
John, have one land-line phone on the premises, so during an outage you’ll have some means of communication.
*****************
Regarding the mahem that these storms were reported to have caused, I’m relieved you got your power back in less than 24 hours.
Elmo
I’m back up too, and shocked and delighted about it. Since I’m on a well, no power also means no water, so no shower despite sweaty nasty day. From the damage I saw this morning, I’m amazed to be back up so quickly.
I had a fan on an extension cord to an inverter plugged into my truck cigarette lighter just so I wouldn’t melt. God I’m glad to have ac and water back on.
Left Coast Tom
Some of the prettiest places in the country have no hope of cell service.
jl
@cathyx: It’s hotter than usual here, and is affecting my brain. I don’t know what I am saying.
(though if I said how ‘hot’ some commenters would come out here to the Left Coast and punch me in the neck)
Elmo
@jl:
I used to live at 8000 feet in the Sierra. A heat wave was two consecutive days at 80 degrees with about 10% humidity. I miss my mountains…
realbtl
@Left Coast Tom:
Good!
kindness
I can just imagine the wig strapped to Tunch’s head but I’ll bet he put up quite a fight when you scrawled ‘Wilson’ across his head.
Xecky Gilchrist
I began to feel like Tom Hanks in Cast Away.
Are you sure you didn’t feel just like you were in a refugee camp? Wait, that’s McMegan having to wait in line for an iPhone or some dumb thing like that.
aangus
@TBogg: I was more worried that it would be the reverse.
: )
YellowJournalism
So did you sit in a cave somewhere, flashlight aimed and flashing at a pocket watch with Lily’s picture in it?
(There’s a fat Hanks/skinny Hanks joke that’s dying to be made, but John has been through enough already.)
Nutella
@elftx:
Panic in the streets! Tax on investment income will rise from extremely low (15%) to very low (18.8%). Those damn Chicago-style commies strike again!
Steeplejack
@TBogg:
Or vice versa.
PaulW
Just imagine how people back in the 1970s fared. How anyone could live without the Intertubes… I mean, wow…
ImNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
i can haz unmoderationlichtkeit, plz?
Cheers,
Scott.
Steeplejack
@elftx:
ZOMG! The tax on my rentier income for which I do not actually sweat is going to skyrocket from 15% to 18.8%. (But only if I make more than $200,000.) The horror. The horror.
Patricia Kayden
Know exactly how you feel. My AC just got fixed yesterday just in time for 100+ degree weather.
Heliopause
I’ll give you $5 if you knock out one of your teeth with an ice skate.
cathyx
@Heliopause: Wow, that much?
Mnemosyne
Argh. I’m trying to get my brand-new Virgin Mobile iPhone set up (thanks again to the commenter who clued me in) and I’ve stalled out at the WiFi portion because my husband keeps the password … somewhere and he’s still at work. And not answering either one of his phones.
I’m tellin’ ya, this is just as bad as the Bataan Death March!
cathyx
@Mnemosyne: I have always assumed you were a male from everything you have written. I’m floored.
Tunch
@TBogg:
فسبحان الله.
وتضاعف كل ما عندي من الكراهية لجون كول في Tbogg. غضب لي لا نهاية لها وسوف يكون لي بلدي الانتقام. وسوف أخطط هجوم لي بعناية، وانه لن يعرف عدوه حتى آخر لحظة. ثم قال انه يجب ان ننظر الى لي، Tunch القانوني، وقال انه يجب معرفة خوف!
ولكن أولا سوف يكون لي الطعام وقيلولة 1.
يحصل لي كول التونة! أنا الجوع.
-Tunch
P.S. ..l..
Mnemosyne
@cathyx:
Well, I could have been male since you don’t have to be a woman to have a husband these days but, yes, I’ve been female all my life.
If you knew your Greek mythology, my nym might have clued you in. ;-)
Steeplejack
@Mnemosyne:
Had that here tonight. The Brazilian power-outage refugees came with their laptops and couldn’t get connected to the house wi-fi. Rioting narrowly averted. Had to call bro’ man at the beach to find out where the password was hidden.
cathyx
@Mnemosyne: It’s like when I listen to the radio and hear a DJ talk, and form a picture in my head of what he/she looks like. Or someone’s spouse. They never look like what I pictured. In fact, usually they are the complete opposite of what I picture.
Steeplejack
@Tunch:
هذه الرسائل لا تستحق عناء لترجمة.
Steeplejack
@Mnemosyne:
Speak, Memory.
cathyx
@Tunch: I’m thinking that Tunch is being translated by Amir Khalid.
Flying Squirrel Girl
I live in Costa Rica and I’m pretty sure we get power restored quicker than you folks in the US. Granted it probably goes off about 10X as often but we are never without for more than an hour, unless there’s a tropical storm. And I live rurally. And it’s all owned and operated by the government.
FSG +4
cathyx
@Flying Squirrel Girl: And I’ll bet any money you get 4 bars on your cell phone too.
freemark
I’m guessing Tunch speaks in Arabic to keep John from figuring out what he is up to.
freemark
@Flying Squirrel Girl:
How long have you lived in Rush Limbaugh’s future destination?
Tunch
@Steeplejack:
أنا القط. وأنا لم يكن لديك الابهام.
وأنا جائع جدا.
هذا أمر محزن جدا. سوف اشعر بتحسن بعد قيلولة.
سكرتير خاص يرجى الاتصال على الشرطة، جون كول تحتجز لي سجين.
-Tunch
Valdivia
good to know you are ok and back to civilization!
Cap'n Magic
From a kindred website, this dose of reality was in the comment section:
Now that the ACA passed, will El Rushbo move to Costa Rica like he said he would come 2015? We need to start a countdown clock…
Valdivia
@Steeplejack:
ha ha ha, so so true.
Spaghetti Lee
@Cap’n Magic:
I’ll help him pack. Shouldn’t be hard. Suitcase full of pills, suitcase full of dildos, three polo shirts and a change of undies.
PurpleGirl
@jharp: We aren’t putting in the investment to upgrade and update the electrical grid. At one time the various states held utilities in their state responsible for maintaining the grid. It was something the utilities had to report on when they asked for rate increases. But as the sector has been deregulated, companies consolidated, and non-generating retail sellers became more common, the responsibility for maintaining the grid and long-distance power lines was often left unassigned. Hence, power outages are more common. Also left largely unattended are programs to trim trees and foliage which can cause power lines to fall and be pulled down by snow and ice during the winter.
ETA: It takes so long to get things fixed because the companies no longer maintain the same number of repairmen and linemen as they once did. Saves on salaries and stuff you know.
Cap'n Magic
@Spaghetti Lee: I’m actually toying with registering byebyelimbaugh.com and put up a website with a countdown to March 9, 2015-5 years to the day when he made that announcement.
redshirt
The first night I got on the Internet – what a glorious moment! – was sometime in early 1996. I was downloading Guinness Beer ads from yore. Line by line, they were delivered!
I snapped to at 3AM, going WTF?
Raven
“President Obama sounded weary and maybe a tad worried late Friday during a rambling conference call with campaign donors whom he repeatedly begged to send money—and send it now.”
Daily Beast
redshirt
Also too: After suffering for years from work induced insomnia (to wit: I’d think about work going to sleep, and never get to sleep), I found a cure: Visualising a Cast Away scenario – you land on a good sized deserted tropical island. What do you do? I go through elaborate mental scenarios in this scenario, and am inevitably asleep in less than ten minutes. It’s counting sheep but far more involved. Counting sheep works, it’s just so boring. Anything you can do to distract yourself from your real world when trying to get to sleep is effective, if it engages you. Counting sheep often fails due to its simplicity. The Cast Away scenario is filled with thousands of details – what would you drink? What would you eat? Where would you sleep?
A funner scenario involves bringing a waterproof crate packed with useful items – what would you pack? How would you use these items? For example, tarps. So useful!
If you have trouble sleeping, I encourage you to think about this scenario – or one of your choosing – in detail. You will go to sleep soon after.
Valdivia
@Raven:
ugh.
gogol's wife
@redshirt:
I try to reconstruct the plots of 1930s movies in my head. It usually works. You’re right that it has to be something fairly complicated but not too complicated.
redshirt
@gogol’s wife: Exactly. And nothing that could turn personal – for example. I intially tried this technique using the “Build my dream house if money were no object” scenario – you know. Private island. Helipad. Indoor basketball court/pool/tennis court. Turret. Etc. But I found the scenario would veer into the personal matter of money and my worries about it, causing elevated stress and thus lack of sleeping.
The desert island – or 30’s movies – is far removed from the day to day yet simultaneously accessible as to not engage emotions while providing a rich mental space for diversion.
Mnemosyne
@redshirt:
I have a very “noisy” brain thanks to ADHD, so first I have to get up and write down all of the stuff that’s keeping me awake, and then I can try other things to fall asleep.
Counting backwards from 100 usually helps.
RinaX
I can’t laugh at you. I myself had a mini-meltdown when Netflix was out for about an hour last night and I couldn’t get to finishing season 5 of Supernatural. We were also lucky enough not to lose power during the tropical storms that rolled through this area last month, so as of now I have not had to confront the reality of how dependent I am on the internets and technology for a very long time.
dww44
@Violet: I continue to have an
old Analog phone from the Pre Bell Split-up era and plug it in whenever there’s a power outage. Such a nice feeling to have communications.
dww44
@PaulW: Well, somehow we managed. Lots more face time with our friends and family.
BruceFromOhio
@redshirt: … which would inevitably veer back into whatever it was that was keeping me awake. Figured there had to be some sort of “transitional imagery,” some way to give the noggin permission to put aside one thing for another by acknowledging the worry but agreeing to put it aside for a bit.
So I came up with the freight train visualization scenario: an open flatbed train car at the end of a freight train, rolling towards a tunnel. On the train car are all the people and things that are keeping me awake: people, objects, just sort of sitting or strewn around. I acknowledge each one and that it is there as the tunnel approaches. Go into the tunnel, and it all goes black, just for a few moments. Then its out the other side and across a nice-sized trestle over a river – that’s the visual trigger for transition. All these people and stuff has value and I’m acknowledging it, and the trestle & river provide a break point: the rain slows to a stop on the other side and I step off. The train starts back up again: its going to come back in awhile and pick me back up, and all that stuff will be there, just as I left it. But for now, I walk down the slope away from the track to the river. Sometimes there are trees, leaves crunching under my feet. Sometimes its rock and sand and pebbles. Sometimes its sunny, sometimes its raining. Below is the rush of the river, and the water flows over rocks making little splashes all over the place. I visualize walking upriver, hearing the rush of the water, away from the tracks, and just keep the imagery up from there. Doesn’t take long to slip below the surface of sleep into oblivion.
I’m getting sleepy just typing about it.
dww44
@Raven: Thanks. I just made a contribution. Small dollar one. But, I feel better for having done so. He earned it this week, for sure.
BruceFromOhio
@dww44 @Raven: Your action was my inspiration to do the same. Thanks!
HRA
@redshirt:
There was a time when I had the most terrible time getting to sleep. Even getting up and making a hot tea with honey plus toast would not work as it had done in the past.
I know why it was happening. A close family member was suffering from ALS. I tried counting backwards and solving math problems. It did not help. Reconstructing this old house room by room helped me then and still helps me now.
Cermet
Second day without power and they are saying days – even a week for some. Generator running but when the fuel runs out today, have to wait until Monday (to get cash – currently no credit card; some criminal org got the number via wi-fi when my girlfriend decided to use a coffee’s shop wi-fi to buy a T-shirt! Had to cancel it. Nice thing here, being a credit card not responsible for the transactions. If it had been a debt card then my account would now be empty and I’d most likely have to eat the lost. I got rid of that card two months ago because of this exact worry; if she had used that card instead, I would have really had issues.)
So much for electronic convenience!
Thank god that investors make a few more penies on their stocks because the electric companies don’t have to cover extra money on repair staff that wasn’t needed – why repair lines quickly when lost in service is trivial compared to those massive costs of having repair staff on hand.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Cermet: If it had been a debt card then my account would now be empty and I’d most likely have to eat the lost. I got rid of that card two months ago because of this exact worry; if she had used that card instead, I would have really had issues.)
My debit card number and PIN was stolen, probably a part of the compromised PIN pads mess at Michaels. My credit union clamped down on the card in less than a minute after the first suspicious withdrawal, and I had the money back within a few days. The thief used it on a Saturday; they had waived the paperwork for the fraud claim by the time I showed up at my local branch on Monday. (A lot of people got hit. I suspect they started declining transactions from outside the state shortly thereafter.) I didn’t ask what they were doing to help the people who didn’t have enough savings to carry them through, but it wouldn’t surprise me for them to have loaned other victims the money against their claim, then waived fees and interest when the claim came through. They’re just cool like that.
Jay in Oregon
@redshirt:
I do tech support and tinker with programming in my spare time, so bedtime is a good time to read through something informative and dry like JavaScript: The Complete Guide (my current topic of choice).
Jay in Oregon
@Cap’n Magic:
I said this in the other thread: Limbaugh is an egotistical asshole. He won’t go, he never intends to go, and if anyone calls him on it he’ll them liars or claim that he’s being harassed by liberals.
I was discussing this with someone else the other day, and I realized something. When is the last time Rush Limbaugh did any media appearances outside of his own shows? He doesn’t seem to put himself into any situation where he doesn’t control the conversation.
Interesting, that.
Ronzoni Rigatoni
@BruceFromOhio: Ha! I just read boring books in bed and am out cold in 5 minutes (usually). The downside is that sometimes you reach a point where the schlock becomes moderately interesting. Then I’m up all damned night. Martinis work nicely. Lotsa Martinis.
LONG ISLAND SNOW REMOVAL
Some people really need to study God’s word ,Steven S.for example states”I am a gay christian” but if he really understood the laws of God he would repent and be saved because as long as he claims to be gay and pratices such then he is not a christian at all in biblical terms. People are always trying to find a way to justify their way of living if it is contrary to Gods way therefore they think they can escape condimnation and the guilt that goes along with it ,may God help you all.
Soonergrunt
@LONG ISLAND SNOW REMOVAL:
Let he among you who is without sin cast the first stone. John 8:7
Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Matthew 7:3
Therefore you have no excuse, everyone of you who passes judgment, for in that which you judge another, you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things. Romans 2:1
Now kindly fuck right off. soonergrunt 1:1