Seven Days Of Darkness

I finally got my electricity back today, after being without it since last Saturday night. It still might be awhile before I resume regular posting, though, because I have enormous amounts of work to do here. My living room looks like a refugee camp (which is pretty much what it was, this past week), I need to do some serious grocery shopping since my refrigerator and freezer are entirely empty (I tossed out their contents last Monday, once I realized there was no chance the power would come back in time to save the food), I'm outrageously behind on various freelance assignments and, while I'm not the type who responds to every unpleasantry in life with cries of "There oughtta be a law!", I do think there oughtta be a law saying that if you have trees on your property, you cannot let their branches grow over or through aboveground utility wires. (It's one thing if your tree outright falls over; I'd consider it unreasonable to expect trees to be far enough away from neighborhood wires to cause no damage if they topple. But branches that fall straight down after being overburdened by wet, heavy snow should NOT bring power lines down with them, and entire neighborhoods should not suffer a week of cold darkness just because some homeowner -- or city landscaping department -- is too damned irresponsible to keep their trees properly trimmed.)

Between spoiled food, lost freelance work, and the expense of using candle oil as a primary heat source, I personally lost over a thousand dollars from this storm (and Zod knows I was never too rich to begin with). Discarding leftovers, or half-empty condiment bottles and jelly jars, didn't bother me too much, but throwing away entire unopened packages of chicken, bacon and beef, the unopened half-gallon of milk, the almost-full cartons of expensive ice cream and so forth, outraged every frugal bone in my body (which is to say, every bone in my body except maybe a couple of the smaller ones in my inner ear). If I'd known (or even suspected) that I'd suffer such a power loss, I would NOT have bought any freezer or refrigerator food when I went grocery shopping last week.

On the other hand, once I could see the bottom of my fridge and freezer for the first time since we moved in here seven+ years ago, I discovered it was kind of gross, so maybe it's just as well I had the chance to clean it up; when the power came back on today, the first thing I did was turn on the heat, and the second thing I did was scrub down the inside of the fridge and freezer with hot soapy water.

Housekeeping advice: you really should clean out your fridge and freezer at least once every eight years.