fine whine

So today I still have no power. Last night Jessica and I slept over at the nice and toasty warm house of some friendly neighbors which which we had previously exchanged probably half an hour's worth of words. We chit-chatted for for much more than that last night, watching the various networks (on cable, woo hoo) reveal the same information over and over again about the bleak forecast and the varying hundreds of thousands of people in Ohio also without power or worse. They all seemed to have the same fifteen minutes of footage of one pole on fire and a car spinning out and so forth. Really exciting stuff.

Tonight we're crashing over with Scott and Carina and Tayler and Tyler (and Xanth and Ezra and Simon and Echo) and we also brought our cat too. I feel bad in that we're somehow infringing upon their Christmas stuff, but also recognize that now that all of the hotels and motels are full of the other 199,998 people also missing power we're going to need to impose on somebody's Christmas somewhere. I hate this. Pardon the pun, but I feel so powerless without my electricity and whatnot.

To add insult to injury our phone service has also died out. I'm going to assume that the problem lies outside our walls because I really, really, really do not want to pay the phone company seventy one bucks to tell me that something inside our house is broken, which is probably a problem I could fix if I had more than a flashlight to see by in the cold, dark basement. Even worse than that was the fact that Jessica was trying to talk to the electric company at the time.

Oh, by the way, thank you AEP for sending us your Christmas card, er, I mean bill today. Jerks.

All we know now is that we might get our power restored by sunday, two days from now, but only in their estimation. They've brought in crews from all over the country and yet the total number of people without power doesn't seem to get any smaller as the days go by. Either things are getting worse or they have no real clue how many people are freezing this holiday weekend. Hopefully they're too busy doing the repairs to keep good statistics, but realistically they're unorganized bastards who cannot adequately repair a faulty system.

To be an engineer and caught up in this is just worse. I'm envisioning ways to improve things at times like this, such as a battery-powered answering device or cordless phones. I'm thinking that the fact that electricity is coursing mere inches away from our dead lines should mean that somebody could splice our line into the working ones. I'm sure some of our neighbors would be more than willing to spare a couple kilowatts here or there to keep us and our cat from being icicles.

It's so clichéd, but I find myself really hating the whole Christmas thing this year. I thought having my transmission fail at seventy miles an hour in the middle of the highway after dark on Christmas Day was bad enough, but that's nothing compared to this. And it's not even over yet.

I feel like a schmuck, too. Being a typical guy I wasn't quite prepared to give Jessica her presents and in fact had planned to take a long lunch today or yesterday to drop by Target to grab a couple more things for her, but somehow was unable to do such in light of the whole evil-storm-from-hell thing. I didn't even have her stuff wrapped.

Merry Christmas? Don't get me started about Christmas.