The power went out at home around 4:30am yesterday morning. Like on most of the east coast, high winds have been whipping like mad since Sunday night. They are starting to die down now. Sunday night, though, it was hard to sleep because 50 mph winds with some 65 mph gusts felt like they were blowing the house down, and I just knew that not cutting down the three dead trees in our yard would prove to be a fatal error.
But - no trees hit the house, although several fell in our neighborhood. The main consequence of the wind has been the electrical outage. AEP says no power until late Thursday night, which I think is nuts. Nuts, I say. Just across the mountain ridge from us, in the same neighborhood as us, I can see kitchen lights and TVs spilling blue glow out the windows as if taunting me. Why do those folks have power? I'm sure the explanation is simple, but I wish I knew.
Meanwhile, Janelle and I ate Little Caesar's last night (side note - whatever happened to Pizza! Pizza!? That was the shit when I was a kid. Two square pizzas for the price of one. Dad picked them up at least once a week.) and then sat in the living room, reading by the light of a kerosene lamp until 9:00 or so.
I finally finished Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End today during lunch. Bravo. Super great read. I don't know if I like the book because I work in an office (it can be described as office humor, I guess) or the odd little things about it. It's written in first person plural (We this, we that) although you never learn who the narrator is. At one point, the plot seems to be nearing a horrifying and seemingly hastily written conclusion, until tragedy is averted. The novel is brilliantly constructed - the organization is superb, really - and each character is memorable and likeable, mainly because each represents "that guy" or "that girl" in any given office.
I gotta go back to work, now. Next up, I plan to re-read The Gunslinger (wish I had known it had been revised before I read the first version), and then carry on with the rest of King's Dark Tower series. I can't wait.
