STORMY WEATHER

For the foreseeable future, blogging will be sporadic. At best.

Thursday evening around 5:45, we lost power at JYB World Domination Headquarters. We've been without electricity ever since.

Welcome to the life of a country gentleman, circa 1870. No lights, though we do have a gas stove and water heater, so we're not totally uncivilized. And the phones still work. The phones always work, those 48 volts the only electricity that have entered our house by normal means since last week.

But other than the power outage, Isabel wasn't that bad to us. Our house still stands. It never flooded. Our wind-up radio kept us informed during and after the storm, telling us where we could stand in line for two hours for a 10-pound bag of dry ice (we opted for no line and $2.50 bags of wet ice, a couple of times), and which towns and neighborhoods had it worse than us. Most had it worse than us.

Much of Baltimore's downtown was underwater Friday. The Inner Harbor was just, for a while, the harbor. Trendy Fell's Point looked like Venice until Sunday. Several towns along the Bay got swamped in the storm surge. Thousands of people across Maryland lost their homes, to say nothing of the worse damage done in Virginia and North Carolina. We at JYB WDHQ were lucky--we just lost power. But our nextdoor neighbor never lost power, and allowed us to use an outlet on her patio, so we have a working fridge, a lamp, and a little tv set again. I can recharge my PDA. Life's not so bad at all for us.

I guess the worst part was, shortly after our power went dead, hearing radio reports of a tornado in Delaware that was moving at 75 mph. I haven't heard anything about that since, so it must have turned out false. I can't imagine a tornado moving at that speed.

No, the worst part, or maybe the coolest part, was hearing the power grid die. Thursday night around 9 I went out to sit on the porch, just to listen to the wind. The rain was surprisingly light, but the winds were gusty and occassionally ferocious. As I sat listening and watching the branches in a nearby oak, deciding which one would break off first, I heard a loud explosion off to the north. Transformer, I thought, and as I looked in the direction of the sound I saw another transformer die in a hail of blinding sparks. In the two or so minutes I remained outside, I heard half a dozen more transformers pop out. I figured that I'd been listening to the entire chain linking my house to the power plant go offline in succession. Thus far that intuition seems to have been proven right.

No, the worst part of Isabel must have been the whining, which continues. Almost as soon as the storm had passed, people began to call in to the local talk radio stations (talk and news radio was our only source of information for days) to whine that the power company hadn't already been to their house, apologized for the three or four hours they'd been without, reconnected them, given them a voucher to pay for the next month's bill and pledged to rebuild the entire power grid so that in the future no hurricane could ever again make them miss more than one nanosecond of the nonsense they were watching on tv when the lights went out. Sheesh. As Isabel left town to head north, Democrat party spokesman David Paulsen started launching cheap shots at Gov. Ehrlich, though the gov had literally been updating the state all night via the local media (I know, because I was listening), and had been warning us for days prior that this was a storm to be taken seriously. Officials from both sides of the political aisle worked hard to get people prepared, keep people informed and help clean up afterward. Mouthpieces without consciences serve no purpose in a crisis, and should be muzzled. Some people must think that government can actually control forces of nature. They should change the state's motto from the "Free State" to the "Me State."

Within 24 hours BGE brought in crews from several nearby states and Canada, which they had planned to do before the storm, and has had those 4,000 hard working crews going around the clock to fix the grid as soon as humanly possible. Two of those out-of-state workers were electrocuted over the weekend, dead trying to give people their Jerry Springer fix. Yet much of the state whines and complains about the loss of electricity, when just a few miles down the road some poor schlub is looking at the pile of wood and rubble that used to be his house, which is next to the useless hunk of metal that used to be his car, which is underneath a big white pile of something that he suspects was once his boat. Or maybe it was his neighbor's boat--who can tell? Some people around here lost everything. A few days without power is no big deal.

Suck it up, Maryland. Just suck it up and deal with it.

And that's where we are. Good neighbors who let us use their electricity while delivering a crop of kayenne peppers. A family intact, healthy, and with a new appreciation for simple things like lamps.

So as I said at the top of this post, blogging will be less than constant for a while. Can't post from my PDA. Can't run the computer on wishful thinking.