The blackout continues

Going home from work was interesting. Leaving Seattle was like leaving civilization behind. Suddenly, there was no power. No light. No data. I drove up the hill into Burien and the place was oddly deserted. The billboard that had stood over the U-Stor-It by Highway 509 lay on the ground, shattered. Getting in, the Ella Afos insurance company sign lay shredded, but the flourescent backlights were still there. The same was true of the Olympic Coffee Company, the people who sell me raw beans. Driving in, a tree had fallen over power lines, and a very large tree threatened more, providing shade to a road it had never shaded before.

We were low on firewood, so Omaha sent me back out to find some. The quicklogs were gone, so I decided on honest firewood. There's a little triangle of land that's not good for anything except being a store lot for wood, and the line there was more than an hour deep. I stood there, joking with a young guy with a grizzy beard, and an older gentleman who was worried that his wife was alone, and she was bedridden after a second stroke, and he didn't want her to be cold, or alone.

As we stood there, the foreman came out and said, "If any of you guys want to volunteer this line'll go a whole lot quicker." I raised my hand, and for the next 45 minutes I worked in a firewood yard. A week ago this yard had been full. By now, they were desperatly running the hydraulic splitter as fast as they could in the far corner. There wasn't a lot of wood left. I loaded wheelbarrows, packed 60lb. racks, hauled them to customer's cars, all through the churned muck of a yard with no drainage. It was hot, sweaty, healthy, honest work. And when I was done, the boss lady gave me a deal: I asked for $45 worth of wood. She gave it to me for $20.

I got home and stacked the wood on the driveway, covering it with a tarp. Omaha and I then took Kouryou-chan over to a friend's house: they had offered a week ago to watch her this evening while Omaha and I went to my company's Christmas party.

The blackout continues into the next day...

I awoke the next day around 7:30, surprisingly well-slept. I started a fire in the fireplace, made myself some hot tea, and generally

Fire and Tea
Hosted on Flickr!. Click to enlarge.

occupied myself with making notes and thinking about writing. I couldn't actually write without power, although I took a lot of notes in my notebook. One of the three major radio stations, KIRO, was doing "all crisis, all the time," but they had tried to go back to their regular Saturday schedule. I got a little infuriated that every time a newsbreak came in they mentioned that 170,000 Seattlites were without power while completely ignoring 700,000 other King County citizens were also freezing our asses off.

Omaha eventually awoke around 11:00, and we drove over to see if the library was open, and it was (heat, power, wifi), and then to the Starbucks (it was, but the line was 50 people long). We drove home for breakfast.

Omaha's stomach was really bothering her. Although she had seemed more or less intact when we left the party, apparently she discovered something called a "Chocolate Martini" and had lost count of how many she'd had. I made her dry toast, and myself an omlette (hey, the eggs would go bad soon if the power didn't come on, right?).

We recovered Kouryou-chan, but Omaha's stomach was bothering her badly enough that we went home and she slept most of the day. I made a "warm room" downstairs, blocking off the rest of the house from the downstairs rec room with a blanket and building a fire in the fireplace there. Kouryou-chan and I played KerPlunk! and card games and tried to keep each other occupied.

I walked down to the local grocery store. There was still no power, but generators were up to provide emergency lights and run the registers, and people were shopping. I bought more tea, including rubios vanilla, which Kouryou-chan loves. On the way out, three bucket trucks drove by. Huzzah!

When I got back, KIRO had wisely returned to all-crisis all-the-time. I listened to the host field calls: where can I get gas, where can I find shelter for the evening? There was a lot of that, and it was heartbreaking to listen to. I lucked out by buying gas the morning of the blackout, long before everyone else realized just how bad it would be, and by volunteering in that wood yard, so I had heat for my family. We had PB&J sandwiches and warm tea for lunch.

We settled down along with the night. Candles went up, the fire was stoked, and the three of us played card games by candle and battery-powered camplight. As we were sitting there, discussing whether or not we should play another round of Go Fish or something else, or stop to make dinner, we heard a noise we hadn't heard for two days: thunk! hummmmm.... Omaha and I looked at each other: that was the sound of the electromechanical valve on the furnace being pulled open by the magnet. (Without power it shuts automatically, closing off the gas feed.)

"Do we have power?" Omaha asked. We looked around: there was no other evidence that we did. We ran out into the hallway and hit a switch and it was revelation: we had power. Not only that, but two minutes later we had heat, and a minute after that, data. The house is warm and bright again.