The dark ages

If you’re wondering where I’ve been the past few days, why no Song of the day posts or daily write-ups, the quick answer is: we lost power.

If you haven’t been wondering, the answer’s the same, but you wound me. Truly, you wound me.

As you may have heard, the east coast of the U.S. recently experienced…well, let’s call it a semi-severe hurricane. It certainly wasn’t as severe as hyped, but all told it caused a fair amount of damage — I think estimates put it at the eighth most destructive recorded hurricane, but I don’t have those estimates in front of me — with several deaths and extensive property damage. Here in New York, we escaped relatively unscathed, with Irene reclassified as a tropical storm by the time in made landfall sometime on Sunday.

But also sometime on Sunday, around one in the morning, we lost electricity in the house, on the block, and pretty much across the island. Here on our little street, we’ve yet to get it back, some three days later.

My iPad conked out on me Sunday afternoon, and my office was closed because of all the problems with the trains and buses (which NYC had shut down on Saturday, in anticipation) the storm had wrought. So it wasn’t until today that I got my hands (not literally) on a working electrical outlet, so I could recharge what needed recharging. Namely, everything.

Which is good, because my last day in the office for a while is tomorrow. On Thursday morning, crack of dawn, I’m headed to Canada for a week at the Banff Centre in, appropriately enough, Banff. I’ll be meeting Heather while I’m there, attempting to write a three-day novel, and quite possibly riding a horse. The first of these sounds quite nice, but the other two are quite possibly the early stages of madness. We shall see.

And not to worry, while I’m gone, there will be some posts here. On Saturday, as the rain picked up outside, I spent some time post-dating stuff. That’s where the daily link posts have been coming from, and there will be songs of the day aplenty while I’m gone. Maybe even a Random Friday Guess 10. If time permits — and I’m not thrown dangerously from either the horse or the novel — I may even check in from time to time. I’ll certainly be checking in via my Twitter page. Now may be the moment you’ve been waiting for to join and follow me there. C’mon! I thought Twitter was dumb before I started, too!

Anyway, one more day of work, possibly several more days without power, and a long morning of traveling to Alberta on Thursday. Till then, it’s mostly reading and games of Monopoly — we played, my parents and sister and me, on Sunday; I won — by flashlight. It’s shaping up to be a weird week.