Our weekend power outage lasted 46 hours, my parents’ lasted 67.
On Tuesday, my parents’ neighborhood had a water main break and they had a 6 hour boil water order. And then our power went out right after lunch and I had to drive in to work to finish my workday.
Wednesday, from about 4 to 5:30, the power went out again — 4 or 5 times for a few seconds or a couple of minutes at a time. Then it went out for about 40 minutes; when they got it back on the listed cause was “equipment damage”, so maybe it’ll finally stay on reliably now? Regardless, I’m finally buying a UPS; that rapid off/on/off/on stuff concerns me.
But also Wednesday, we had some strong wind and it ripped some siding partway off our house. It and other stuff was banging around, which startled the dogs, who knocked some stuff over. At one point my spouse got up to see what the noise was and I didn’t see what happened, but her mountain dulcimer broke in what seems like an unlikely way, a relatively solid piece of wood just sheared right off. (Should that also count as storm damage?)
This morning (Thursday), Spectrum (our internet provider) is having some kind of outage. They didn’t send any notifications about it, so I wasted some time rebooting my router etc. But I was finally able to get through on my phone and check. So here I am working in the office again.
At this point I’m just going to say that California governor Gavin Newsom — who seems to be making a play for the next presidential election — is a coward and a hypocrite. The sort of career politician who just goes where the wind blows. He’s been “liberal” because California wanted a liberal, but right now he seems to think MAGA is ascendant so he’s following their lead. He’s recently spoken out against trans athletes, and against people stating their pronouns. His podcast has been him talking to shitbags like Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk — and not challenging them on their bullshit at all. I didn’t know this before, but apparently as mayor of SF, he had a drinking problem; he had an affair with an underling who was married to his campaign manager; he dated a 19-year old model at age 39. As governor, he went to a fancy dinner party at a posh restaurant with no mask, during COVID lockdown.
He is absolutely not the sort of person we need to lead us out of the mess we’re in; he’s exactly the opposite.