Pleasantville by candlelight

[redbird]

Alas, this is not a romantic interlude, however middle-American. It's the result of a tree taking down a power line in mid-afternoon, while several of us were reading manuscripts for the NY Review of SF. Lacking any better idea of what to do while waiting for David and Kathryn, who actually live there, to return with groceries, we adjourned to the porch, and read by daylight. Dim daylight, because it was a rainy day.

David and Kathryn returned in due course, and found a few oil lamps and several candles. Fortunately, while the stove is electric, the grill is propane-fueled, and they'd been planning on grilling sausages and such for supper anyway, so that went on without a hitch. We talked about the manuscripts, and sf publishing and cons more generally, and blackouts of the past. After supper, I asked for a ride to the station because I'd run out of manuscript to read, and there was no other useful work to do with the power still off.

I was basically dry until I got off the A train, thanks to a combination of train and bus shelters and a conveniently located scaffolding over the sidewalk between the railroad and the bus stop. By the time I'd walked the third of a mile from the A to my house, my jacket was wet clear through, but cattitude had put a kettle up, and the wet air was scented with locust. The only real annoyance was damp eyeglasses--but not too damp to avoid puddles, or to spot the mallards under the birch tree.

Comments

[crazysoph.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons I like LJ so much is I get to compare these nitty-gritty details of living...

I'm intrigued because living in Ireland, I only remember two black-outs - one during the middle of the day maybe 2(ish) years ago (and, having a gas stove, I was one of only 3 people in our block who could still make a cup of tea, heh heh!) and before that, maybe another 2 years? All due to silly work-related outages.

It's less comfortable "down-country" where I guess electricity is still conducted in over-ground lines: Christmas storms knocked out a large section of country two years running. (And, given the structural set-up of electric stoves, that was a lot of Christmas turkeys left half-raw...)

But, sort of back-ground, all this... I'm finding myself amazed at how many outages you have, in a large city,... something in me is finding this very wrong. I think actually there is something about local histories and developments relative to both locations that I just have missed understanding.

Crazy(still recites where to find candles and matches in the dark)Soph

Clarification, and more on past blackouts

[redbird]

Pleasantville isn't in the city, it's a suburb up in Westchester. With overhead power lines. I have had two power outages in all my years of city life: one a few summers back when our section of Manhattan lost power because the lines leading into the neighborhood were old and overstressed, on a very hot evening; the other in 1977 when lightning took out one of the high-tension lines that feeds all of New York City.

The tales of previous outages included events in other cities over many years. One I didn't mention was watching a hurricane come up the coast. I was in New Haven, Conn., then. The governor had declared a state of emergency, so we were all home from work, watching the Weather Channel--until the cable company, which was on the edge of town, lost power. We were downtown, buried lines, no problem--the next day I gave away the candles I'd bought to an acquaintance who had no electricity.

Re: Clarification, and more on past blackouts

[jerusha.livejournal.com]

I grew up in Pleasantville, and can attest that power outages due to weather are not terribly frequent, but are a fact of life, because all of the service is above-ground. For the same reason, cable TV is not quite as reliable as one would hope.

I think, growing up, that we lost power maybe once a year or once every other year, seldom for more than an hour or two at a time. Since my parents have a gas stove (and on-site propane - no gas mains) and an oil furnace (although the ignition is electric, this could have been gotten around if necessary), power failures were more of an adventure than an emergency. Especially since outages are most frequent in winter, when keeping perishables cool is a matter of boxing them up and putting them on the back porch :)