The power goes out and the writing goes on

December 9, 2024

On Saturday night and into Sunday morning there was a scheduled power outage for maintenance work. We received the email notification a couple weeks ago, and a reminder with our most recent bill.

Our bill is delivered via email because we’re on the no-paper plan but the reminders all had to be sent via email regardless because there’s a postal strike in Canada right now which is proving to be an unmitigated disaster for many small businesses (not to mention community aid organizations) during the peak shopping and giving season. Never mind no one in Canada is mailing Christmas cards this year. 👀

Our electricity is distributed by Riverport Electric Light Commission (RELC), established in 1920 and one of the oldest independent utility organizations in Canada. This is interesting to me and something I’d like to investigate further. There is so much I don’t understand about every single system I depend upon in the modern world, including my electricity.

A community owned utility… what is this all about? Suppose I should pay more attention to those emails and maybe even go to a community meeting.

Back to the scheduled power outage. Power was to be out from 11pm on Saturday through till 8 am on Sunday.

Our house is heated primarily through electricity. We have an electric boiler for our concrete radiant floor heating. And an electrically-run heat pump. Neither could operate during the power outage. I imagine our house experiences significant heat loss through the front windows though I couldn’t quantify it. On sunny days those windows are also a source of passive solar heat.

Anyway, the house was cold when we got up. Outdoor temps were hovering at OC, so it was a mild December cold.

We tapped into our third source of heating, our wood stove, and started to return the cozy to our cathedral ceiling living space.

I have eagerly anticipated living in a home with a wood stove. To have such technology in my home is a continual source of delight, comfort, and security.

We made coffee on our propane stove, using our camping/travel hand grinder to grind the beans.

By this point it was after 8am, the power was not back on yet and our house was still chilly so I took my coffee to-go and walked over to check on the folks.

Mom and Dad’s house was cooking warm. They have a smaller space to heat and Dad had the wood stove cranked. We had to open the door to cool off.

We sat around their wood stove, but not too close (it was so warm), and drank our coffees, chatting about life. The power flicked on for a bit so Mom went to take a shower and while in there the power went off. She managed to wash off the soap before the pressure and heat was gone.

The power came back on again and Dad said “it’s about time to make some Sunday morning bacon and omelettes, wanna stay for breakfast?”

So I went back home to grab the rest of my morning coffee that I was keeping warm in the carafe and to tell Damien he was invited for breakfast.

We tromped back over on the snowy driveway, and through the woods, and sat at my parent’s island while Dad cooked us his Sunday morning special: bacon, popcorn popped in the bacon fat, veggie and cheese omelettes, and toast.

More stories, more chatting, more shootin’ the breeze.

After some false starts, the power was fully on by this point.

We ate a hearty breakfast together and then I could not delay the day’s work any longer. It was back to my paper.

Writing papers on weekends is not how I want to live my life at 49 years old, but this too shall pass.

Over the course of the day the snow turned to rain. I was going to walk in the woods regardless and but the rain had tapered by the time I was out the door at 3pm. On my walk the day before with Mom we had enjoyed the magic of sparkly snowflakes in the woods.

Later in the evening when I had shut down my writing for the day, and after I had prepared and eaten supper I went back to Mom & Dad’s to finish watching The Sticky.

The days would be absolutely golden if it wasn’t for this damn paper, which is kicking my ass. But it could be argued, quite convincingly, that these days are golden, as is. And except for those hours I spend in a very uncomfortable mental struggle, trying to put together complex ideas sentence by sentence, sometimes crying in my distress at the difficulty of the work, I would have to mostly agree. But I still really don’t like the writing.

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