18 lines
1.9 KiB
Markdown
18 lines
1.9 KiB
Markdown
---
|
||
title: 'Manhole Cover Go Boom'
|
||
date: '2005-09-19T18:33:15-04:00'
|
||
permalink: /manhole-cover-go-boom/
|
||
tags:
|
||
- life
|
||
- pondering
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
Here’s one way to get out of the office before dark: have the power go out. The Claremont Colleges are on one of those reduced-cost power dealies (I think that’s the technical term), whereby we have to shut off the power in the event of rolling blackouts, but pay a vastly reduced price per kilowatt-hour when the juice is flowing. Since the colleges got all generator’d up, this has not been a problem; as I noted [this time last week](/oops/), we generally move pretty seamlessly to backup power, and so don’t even notice the downtime.
|
||
|
||
Today, not so much. Apparently something exploded at approximately 2.30 this afternoon, a few blocks down from my office building, near where a bunch of construction is being done. As of 6.30 this evening, when it got too dim to continue working in the office, the power had not yet been restored.
|
||
|
||
So the good news is I’m home early. And I got to walk home through one of the weirdest SoCal September evenings I’ve ever seen: the sky was positively *yellow*, with dark clouds up above, and the sunset striking them from underneath. The only reasons I know they were clouds and not, for instance, the [smoke](/a-sure-sign-of-the-apocalypse/) that has blanketed this area during the last [two](/where-theres-smoke/) years at this time, is that there were these weird drops of *water* falling from them at random intervals (not many, but some, nonetheless), and a ginormous rainbow arrayed against them. Aside from that, the skies were positively apocalyptic.
|
||
|
||
Now that I think about it, though, this is the second Monday in a row that some fluke has kicked out the power in this area. And weren’t there those completely unexpected rolling blackouts just a couple of weeks before that? Is there something going on here that we ought to know about?
|
||
|