Doesn’t look like we’ll be needing the ol’ kiva fireplace in the master bedroom for a while, if the long-range forecast is any guide.
Actually, we’ve never needed it, nor the bigger one in the living room neither. We both got our fill of wood-burning Back in the Day®, when we lived at 8,800 feet in frosty CrustyTucky and tossed big chunks of aspen, cedar, piñon, and oak into the Lopi fireplace insert faster than ICE Barbie’s masked goons throw brown people out of the country, only with less horseshit and gunfire.
Here in scenic cosmopolitan Duck!Burg, a couple-three thousand feet lower and more than a few Fahrenheit degrees higher, we manage to skate by with fossil fuels. This keeps Your Humble Narrator away from chainsaws, always a good idea, especially in these dark days. Will he do an injury to himself or someone else? Stay tuned!
The chainsaw always made me nervous, actually. What I liked was splitting rounds with the ax, another implement that should probably be under lock and key for the duration. The chainsaw is long gone, but I still have an ax, a couple smallish camping hatchets, and a few handsaws in case I need to dispose of a body … uh, of some downed limbs! Tree limbs!
Goddamnit, this is what comes of reading the news of a morning. Some days there just isn’t enough coffee in the world.
But it does look like we will have oddly springlike conditions for the near future, and so instead of burning wood or anything else, I can expend a few calories on the old bikey-bike. And without all the heavy-weather gear, too.
At this rate, an old white guy could find himself browning up enough to get deported. I hear South Sudan is lovely this time of year.
“Our special correspondent in the day after tomorrow reports,” the journalist was saying. … — H.G. Wells, “The Time Machine.”
We traveled back in time for a while yesterday. Seemed appropriate, given Tuesday’s events.
Instead of tapping, tapping like a stately Raven upon the keyboard after the power went out at 12:53 a.m. Thursday — and stayed out, for nearly 15 hours — it was scribble, scribble, scribble like Mr. Gibbon, recording my little fragments of history with pen and paper.
When your entire life has been light on calamities, save those self-inflicted, it’s illuminating to see just how far up your ass you’ve been storing your head. The things you don’t think about until circumstances insist.
Let’s begin at the beginning.
Campfire coffee, but indoors.
First, when the indoors feels like the outdoors you dress like the homeless, albeit with a dash more style because you and your spouse scored some killer deals while doing time in the outdoor industry. When I hit Keller’s for tortillas as the storm began rolling in on Wednesday the two dudes I saw using Heights Cleaners as a windbreak were not outfitted so handsomely.
Next, an electric gooseneck kettle is great for making coffee when there is electricity. Without juice it’s the battered old blue enamelware pot, gas cooktop, and butane lighter.
Speaking of heat, we have two fireplaces that we haven’t used in 10 years, because fireplaces are basically heat pumps that run backwards and messy to boot. O, for the highly efficient wood-burning Lopi fireplace insert of good ol’ CrustyTucky. But when the power failed there we had to break out the Coleman camp stove to cook because the range-oven combo was electric.
Let there be light.
We have a portable propane heater suitable for emergency indoor use, but like the fireplaces, it’s never been put to the test. I envision the headline: “Carbon monoxide blamed in couple’s death.” The cat ate their lips. Safer to add layers.
Light, too, was an issue at dark-thirty in the icebox. Instead of flipping a switch we were flipping our wigs as we tracked down the battery-powered flashlights, lanterns, and headlamps we haven’t used in the better part of quite some time. Some were charged; others were very dim indeed, like their owners, who had neglected to stock actual candlepower.
Once the issues of coffee, heat retention, and illumination had been resolved, the next hurdle was finding out what the fuck, etc.
We are, as you know, in the information business, Herself and I. She gets paid to find it, but I am no longer a meat hunter. I’ll track the wily news items, but only for sport. Shooting off my mouth for fun instead of profit.
For a change — ¡Que milagro! — both our iPhones were charged. So we quickly learned that about 50,000 of our fellow New Mexicans were shivering in the dark alongside us, and that it would be something like 2 in the morning — on Friday — before we could expect any relief.
As you might expect, I had a few thoughts about this, along with many other things as well. And as a scribbler emeritus and amateur podcaster I like to share my musings with this small, deeply disturbed audience while they’re fresh. But I can’t do them justice on an iPhone, not without a magnifying glass and a lot of bad language. I deal in emotions, not emoji. I demand at least an 11-inch display and a physical QWERTY keyboard.
The 15-inch 2014 MacBook Pro I’m using now was literally a non-starter. Ever since the “Geniuses” at the local Apple Store buggered its display while replacing the battery it needs an external display to function, and the external display requires (wait for it) electricity.
So I booted up my 11-inch 2012 MacBook Air, which — untouched by “Genius” — still gets excellent life from its battery. When it’s charged. Which it was not. Ten percent and dropping faster than the temperature.
That left the 13-inch 2014 MacBook Pro. Boom! Fully charged. Using the iPhone as a hotspot I popped up some notes about the power outage and a link to the latest episode of Radio Free Dogpatch. Behold, the mountain labors and brings forth a mouse.
Then we waited.
We took a bit of indoor exercise, Herself doing calisthenics in her office, me riding the Cateye CS-1000 trainer as a warmup for some light weightlifting. There was lunch.
Snowpocalypse. Or not.
As the phones slowly lost juice we went on another scavenger hunt, unearthing a handful of portable power banks and lanterns with charging capability that kept communications alive until the power suddenly returned at 3:12 p.m. yesterday, well ahead of schedule.
We were a little worried about losing it again — the forecast called for 5-12 inches of snow in the foothills — but at a glance I’d say the weatherpeople missed their guess by, oh, let’s see here, about 5-12 inches.
So don’t call FEMA. We don’t need a trailer or anything.
As for the political news — well, our special correspondent in the day after tomorrow has yet to file his report. But his friend had some thoughts.
He I know — for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made — thought but cheerlessly of the advancement of mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.
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