mykrocosm

I had a power failure tonight around 6:50pm. The lights didn’t work. But then I noticed the pilot light on the dvd player was still on! The one on the TV was off. A pilot light on a laptop charger was on. All the electric clocks in the house were off. A second laptop was showing in the tray that it was running on DC, not battery. Huh? At first I deduced that the house had multiple electric circuits randomly wired, and that only one breaker had gone. So I went out to the fusebox but it all checked out ok.

Back inside I flipped a switch again, and noticed that the light did come on, but very faintly. Most of the lights in the house were like this, and they tended to fade in and out, from almost nothing to about one quarter of the normal level. And the power level was only enough to sustain pilot lights on appliances, not the actual appliances themselves. So it’s probable that my laptop was not receiving power correctly anyway, despite the AC indicator. I shut it down in case it got damaged.

I headed out onto the street and found a couple of neighbours. I soon discovered that every second house was experiencing the same thing, while the alternating houses were still on full power. Someone said this setup was because of Flinders Hospital. Thinking about it, it makes sense - having two sources of supply to the area, with alternating houses, and the hospital on both.

I immediately classified this as a critical top-level emergency and allowed myself a quick trip to Hungry Jack’s for dinner. Coming back I saw an ETSA truck driving around the area. Eventually the power returned while I was reading by candlelight in the bath… too much information? ok yeah, let me try again. Eventually the power returned at around 9pm.

Dropped Felicia off at the airport this morning… got home from work, the place was empty.  Now what??

The disconcerting feeling lasted for about an hour before I started to feel comfortable with “my own time”.  A whole week of this… yahoo!  Oh, I mean.. darn.

I usually carpool but I have the car this week. On the way to work this morning it was pretty humid so I flicked on the aircon. And it wasn’t even 9am!

I got to thinking about how we’re so dependent on air-conditioning now. How did our grandparents survive a lengthy car or train trip? Are we just fencing ourselves into an ever narrower comfort zone? Ever seen people bickering over a difference of two degrees on the office thermostat? Why do natives of hot desert countries actually swaddle themselves in heavy clothing and long sleeves? What are we doing to our bodies, those wonderfully dynamic biological machines, keeping them in such sterile, unchanging, perfect-t-shirt-and-jeans conditions? Can we believe the figures that claim the earth is getting warmer, and it’s not part of some millenia-long planetary cycle? Does the use of a billion air conditioners wreck the climate, making it hotter, making us install more airconditioners, making it hotter again?

So I flicked the air con off. I opened the window and let the wind in. It wasn’t enough to overcome the humidity, and I still felt vaguely uncomfortable. But at least I was giving my body a chance to stretch, to fend for itself, at the cost of some short term discomfort. And as my engine revs dropped, I gave the planet a tiny, microscopic respite.

Today, Darren touched on similar thoughts about our use of climate control. Obesity, global warming, failure of immune systems, species extinction… are they all related? or is it merely due to the brain’s tendency to draw patterns and relationships between things?

A quick holiday roundup:

We drove down to Mount Gambier for Christmas with my family. We also took a friend from overseas down with us for the experience and the sightseeing - she became part of the family instantly and everybody loved having her. My parents say I seem to surprise them with a new face every time I visit! I think it’s a great way to mix things up a little every year, show off some great country-town hospitality, and its also a good opportunity to slow down the drive and re-appreciate some of the familiar sights we tend to whiz past. We ended up staying a week, eating piles of great food and drinking lots of beautifully cellared wine. Including a sublime 1990 Zema cab sav that I picked up at the cellar door on the way down.

Another thing that made Christmas even better this year was the use of Kris Kringle among the family. Each person first announces their wish-list, and then is randomly selected to buy a gift for one other person. So not only was there much less shopping torture, but much more satisfaction in the giving and receiving, and inherently, a better quality in the actual gifts! We’ll probably continue to use this system, exempting children of course so that they continue to get loads of goodies.

One of my most enjoyable experiences was the one day camp-over with friends at Clayton. Going out in their small sailboat on Lake Alexandrina reminded me how much I love sailing, and I think I started to pick it up pretty quickly. I got to a point where I could almost “sense” the envelope of wind in the sails, and how you can actually sail “close to the edge” and keep it there via mainsail, rudder, or weight. I found I preferred sailing into the wind, because its harder work on the ropes and so in a tactile sense it feels more full of energy to me, and it “seems” faster, even though it may not actually be.

Back at work now!