Electricity

The East Coast blackout last week didn't affect me directly, but it did make me think. For one thing, it made me grateful for my ingrained habit of not getting on an elevator if I have to go to the bathroom, and even more grateful after I read about the woman who was trapped in an office building elevator for 19 hours. This particular habit of mine was developed when I worked in a building with 11 floors--I worked on the top floor, and after I got stuck on the elevator a couple of times, it occurred to me that preparation, i.e., assuming that I was going to get stuck every time I got in the elevator, might be a good idea. I never developed it to the point where I felt like I needed to pack food or anything, but the basic premise--go to the bathroom before you get in--stuck.

Back to the blackout: going without air conditioning would be dreadful right now. It's hot all over the country, probably, but here, in Kansas City, the high today is supposed to be 106, with temperatures staying over 100 all week. People in Europe don't have air conditioning because they don't usually need it, but it's been near 100 degrees there this month, too. And they say there's no global warming . . .

Oh. Back to the blackout. Anyway, I hadn't even given a lot of thought to how much we depend on electricity. Lights, of course, but there are battery powered flashlights, of which we have many, and candles--which, I hear, caused a lot of fires last week. Refrigerators and freezers, again, of course. A lot of food will go bad, but what can you do? My stove is electric, but if I had a gas stove like my mom, I could cook everything in the refrigerator and freezer, which is what she did last winter when they lost power for several days.

Television, obviously. Computers. But it's the things that I never thought about that surprised me and made me think. Cell phones. I guess I've gotten so used to mine, to knowing that I can contact and be contacted at any time, practically, that it surprised me to find out that cell phones weren't working during the blackout. I don't know the reason for that--whether the cell towers need electricity to run (they probably do) or whether the systems were overloaded by people trying to use their phones (a possibility, too).

And then, I thought, oh, well, even if cell phones did work, they would only work to the limit of their battery, and then, without electricity to recharge them, they'd be useless, too.

Oh, but I could drive around and charge it in the car, I thought. And then I heard about the people who couldn't get gasoline because the gas pumps need electricity work . . .

It's a net of ever-cascading problems.

Misty had adventures.

I spent the entire weekend wrestling with a new CDRW drive, and that's very little exaggeration. I went out on Saturday to go to the bank and the library, and got some lunch while I was out (Chipotle chicken burrito bol, no rice), and I went out Sunday afternoon to go to Target and got some lunch then, too (Wendy's Caesar side salad, no croutons), but that was pretty much it.

I was in almost constant email contact with my Mac guru friends, visited all and sundry websites, posted on every message board I could think of, but ultimately was unsuccessful.

Briefly: my external CD recorder stopped working a couple of weeks ago; I ordered a new drive from Iomega, which came on Friday. It came with recorder software ("Hot Burn"), which I installed, but which was dreadful. It took many minutes for it to load up a folder--like, I don't know, twenty minutes to load a folder with a couple hundred files, and that wasn't to burn it, just to load it into memory to burn. And then it would crash.

So I bit the bullet and went out and bought the very expensive Toast software, installed that, and the computer crashed and burned. Many times. Crash. Burn. Crash. Burn. Oh, but of course there was no actual burning involved, because the software couldn't see the recorder. So it was more like: Crash. Crash. Crash.

I gave up sometime last night, figured I'd look at it again sometime this week when I'd been able to back away from it a little bit. Bob was so frustrated with my frustration that he was looking at ads yesterday, thinking of buying me a new computer. I'm not to that point yet, the computer is fine, and surely there's a solution. It's just going to take a lot of trial and error.

For Mac types -- it's undoubtedly an extension conflict. I probably just haven't been approaching it in a logical manner. I thought I had, but then, everything I tried, I just expected to work. I haven't been making good notes. So I need to sit down quietly, away from the computer, and try to figure it out before I try anything else.

Back away from the computer . . .