Wednesday, August 6, 2008

It’s 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday and our power is still out at home. We have a generator, allowing our pumps and fridge to work, so I guess we are lucky. I won’t truly feel lucky until I have a whole-house generator and I can run my AC during a lengthy neighborhood power outage. I’m sure I would let my neighbors use it as a cooling center. That’s how I’m pitching it anyway, but I think we all know me well enough to know that I would crank the thermostat down to 72 degrees and lock the doors. I might make a few exceptions, but those would be taken on a case-by-case basis. I guess that I would be more inclined to admit a sweaty MILF over a sweaty anything else.

I just read back that first paragraph, and it makes me sound like an ass. If it weren’t so hot in here (88 degrees), I’d rewrite it. I’m a pretty good neighbor and I would always help anyone who needed it, anywhere I might be. That said: I’d rather help hot girls or little kids. They always seem to be more appreciative. Most of my neighbors have some sort of portable generator anyway, so they don’t really need me. Even the neighbors who used to complain about how loud my generator was have a generator. Ironically, theirs is now much louder than mine. After a while, the hum of the generators is quite hypnotic.

Commonwealth Edison should have an online map that shows where the power is out and when they expect it to be back on. Not only would it be helpful to residents, it would look cool on TV. I tried calling ComEd earlier today to find out when they expected us to get back online, and it took so long that I actually fell asleep. I’m not kidding. I fell asleep, and when I woke up the phone was just buzzing with a dial tone. This outage feels like a two or three-day event. At least it feels that way to me out here where I live. One gets to know how long the outages are going to be by when they occur. This one happened before the brunt of the storm even got to us. That’s not a good sign.