It's comical how dependent we are on the movement of subatomic particles through copper wires. Living five miles from the only village on an island 20 miles from the mainland makes it even more so.
When the electricity goes out, the phone and the Internet also go. Cell phones don't work out here anyway, and my battery-powered radio only picks up static, so I'm starting to feel a little isolated.
Our car has a pretty good radio, but my wife drove out to the old gravel pit to let the dog have an early morning run before the lights went out. She probably doesn't even know that the electricity is off, since there aren't any traffic lights on the island and the only store between here and the pit opens late on weekends.
We get our water from a well, so no electricity means no shower. I used what was likely the last lights-out flush before a coffeeless breakfast – orange juice and a packaged chunk of pastry that could have benefited from a few moments in the microwave.
I have Roomba vacuuming the living room, but he got off to a rough start because he can't communicate with his docking station. Unless the power comes back on, he'll just wander around wondering where home is until his battery dies.
Most of our clocks are battery operated, so I amused myself by resetting them for the end of daylight savings time and feeling screwed out of an hour of sleep.
My computer has about an hour's worth of juice left in its battery. I'd planned to pay the bills, but I do that online.
Maybe I'll just toss this month's trash into the pickup and take it up to the transfer station. It's scheduled to be open today, but its scale and cash register are electric.
The sky has turned dark, it's beginning to rain and the temperature is dropping. I suppose the mainland may have disappeared entirely. I could punch up the camera at the ferry terminal and see if there's any sign of panic; if I could get online.
I'd better stop fooling around and check Facebook and Twitter and see if anybody's posting about the outage.
It sure is dark in here.
