I lost power yesterday at 5am. Based on no updates from the power company I think it’s likely I go at least 48 hours without power. It’s been a long time since I had an outage this long. I live in the city in a fairly busy area so this is highly unusual.
The good news is that the weather means the temp is pleasant without heat or a/c. I have gas hot water heaters so I can still take hot showers. It’s mostly just annoying. Biggest real issue is how much food I need to throw away.
When I grew up, I lived less than 15 minutes away from a nuclear power plant. The longest I was ever without power was about 10 minutes. The first time I lost power in after I moved to Massachusetts, it was for about 4-6 hours, and I was livid. My wife (then girlfriend) was laughing hysterically at me, but I was ranting about MA being a third-world country and who could live like this. Apparently, when she grew up, most of Montreal lost power for 2-6 weeks from an ice storm, so she was better prepared than I.
Power is still out, still no estimate on when it might be restored
Not really annoyed, but…
Ever since I learned the historical definition of “decimate” (remove 1 in 10), I notice the word used and overanalyze it. Like, in a book I’m reading a plague killed 3/4 of the population and one of the characters says something like “the population was almost decimated”. Um - no. It was 7.5x worse than being decimated.
Power came back on last night. It was off for 64 hours. That’s a personal record anywhere I’ve lived. Had to toss the fridge and freezers.
Since you’re being pedantic, which I wholly support, I’m going to have to be (no choice in the matter) pedantic in response and let you know it was actually 6.5x worse, not 7.5x.
But that is one of my pet peeves. When people use “twice as bad as” and “two times worse than” interchangeably. One means 200% of, the other means 200% more than.
(I wonder why I have no friends)
Good point.
Holy crap!!! It’s windy and flurrying here!!! 
It didn’t mean remove 1 in 10 it meant kill 1 in 10 soldiers as punishment. From (the best dictionary!) American Heritage 5th ed.:
Usage Note: Decimate originally referred to the killing of every tenth person, a punishment used in the Roman army for mutinous legions. Today this meaning is commonly extended to include the killing of any large proportion of a population. In our 2005 survey, 81 percent of the Usage Panel accepts this extension in the sentence The Jewish population of Germany was decimated by the war, even though it is common knowledge that the number of Jews killed was much greater than a tenth of the original population. This is an increase from the 66 percent who accepted this sentence in our 1988 survey. However, the Panel is less accepting of usages that extend the meaning to include large-scale destruction other than killing, as in The supply of fresh produce was decimated by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl. Some 36 percent accepted this sentence in 2005, up from 26 percent in 1988, but still a decided minority.
Did you throw out the appliances, or just their contents?
Even so, a loss of 3/4 of the population isn’t “‘almost’ decimated”. It is way more than decimated.
I pulled out the cereal this morning only to realize that when I went to the store yesterday I had mistakenly bought the store-brand Cocoa Puffs instead of the store-brand Cocoa Krispies. (The store-brand boxes all look more or less the same.)
I mean, Cocoa Puffs is a disgusting sugary kids cereal. I can’t eat that.
Watching parents get old and they’re not like what you remember them being sucks. So does having parents of your friends die and being there to comfort them, and at some point realizing your turn to be in their shoes is coming.
Election Coverage:
I think it’s silly. At 7 PM you get: “Well, with 3% of the precincts in Rhode Island reporting, it looks like Candidate Q has a 7 percentage point lead. Let’s see if he can maintain that…”
They should just tell us in the morning who won everything… It’s not like the winners start their job the next day.
It’s all just very annoying. And something tells me this year the coverage will be particularly awful.
I’m not a huge fan of the NYT, but they had excellent coverage of the election 4 years ago, because they explicitly took into account where the early returns came from. Their needle was pointing to “very probably trump” by about 9:30 ET, iirc. Maybe 10.
I was trying to figure out how to say “two times worse than” as “one times worse than” to make it the 100% more than to equal “twice as bad as”, but I guess you would say it as “100% worse than”.
Trying to math in words is wonky.
Dealing with one of those option selection things on the phone that tries to use voice recognition but picks up every little background noise as a possible response.
Gets overanalyzed for sure like most other big news in the world, which is why I kept myself busy cooking dinner, eating dinner, and cleaning up the kitchen. Once I was done I knew it was safe to go to bed.
