Scientific Progress Goes "Boink"

... to quote Calvin & Hobbes.

Everything's Screwy

Yeah, all kinds of screw-ups last night/this morning. First, the electricity goes out last night... oh, about just before 11 pm. About time to go to bed, anyway, right? Only, power went out while the lights and tv were on. So I figure: wait a li'l while and see if they come back on soon so I can turn everything off so they're not on all night when the power DOES come back on.

Power flickers on and off for a bit. Then nothing. Now... out where I'm at now, just outside of city limits, that leaves the place pretty dark. Oh, if you look out the front window, you could see the glow in the near distance from the lights in town. Plus, I fortunately hung up my bug zapper a few nights ago and just left it on. It goes on batteries when not plugged in, so it stayed on when the rest of the lights bugged out. It was enough to get me to the nearby drawer where I keep the flashlights.

When Darkness Falls

Normally, I have a REALLY bright street light just outside my front door... it's kind of an added sense of security with the dark woods just behind me. The absence of that light was pretty palpable. Amway, after about 5 minutes of darkness and the itty bitty blue glow from the buglight, I called up Mom and Pop on the cell (unfortunately, waking them up, but sometimes these things are called for) to ask if they still had power. They did. So I dunno how far the power outage ranged, but it encompassed my entire block.

So I went to bed. Nothin else to do. The bedroom, with the window open to the woods, was pitch black. I mean, pitch. Haven't experienced that kind of darkness in a while. I kept the flashlight turned on, lighting the ceiling, on the bedside table and tried to keep an ear out for the tv comin back on before fallin asleep.

Fake Out

It did... about an hour later. Woke me up out of my semi-sleep, along with the buzz of the fridge comin back on, too. I listened, and it stayed on long enough that I figured it was safe to rouse myself to turn off the tv in the living room. Course, soon as I got in there and picked up the remote, everything went back out again. Pffft...

I woke up again around 2 or 3 am, and everything was back on again. I dunno how long it had been back, but it was there to stay as I turned off the living room lights and tv, then crashed again. I'd set a li'l travel alarm by my bed, but my latest alarm clock/radio is one of those types that sets itself once plugged in, and batteries keep all the alarm settings... though they don't keep the clock on when there's no power. I hadn't opened my fridge or freezer during the outage, and my food seemed to be okay this morning, so I don't think there were any problems in that department.

And The Screwy Goes On...

Amway, I'm not sure I could really use the night's disturbance as an excuse for being late this morning... but it's the best I've got, so there it is. So I got in to work about 9 am this mornin... and just as I got here, all the computers went down. Well... we could get into our Workstation Only setting, but weren't connected to any of the servers or the net or anything. Of course, we keep all of our files only on our personal server drives, we couldn't access our e-mail, couldn't access squat. Amazing how we don't realize how much of our work requires computers until we don't have access to them.

This lasted pretty much all morning. The computer gurus downstairs had no idea what the problem was, and were workin like bees tryin to get it fixed. The impression we got was that the problem was campus wide. Eep!

Everything was back up again by time Mom and I got back from lunch, but half the day was already shot. Since the Office Manager is out today, the Boss usually turns to me in her absence for all the weird li'l stuff he needs done... so I had that to keep me busy and feel like SOMETHING got accomplished today.

Summer Has Entered the Building!

I've been waiting for "Summer" to arrive. And here, "Summer" means everything slows down between the end of the Winter Semester and the beginning of the fall Semester... a time where we can take a deep breath and catch up on projects that have been shoved to the back burner all semester. Well... Summer finally arrived late last week. Obviously, as you can see, since I had a shitload to blog about yesterday.

I have no idea if I'll have more to blog about in future weeks, but I know I'll have more time for it. :)

As long as my computer works, anyway. *snort*