Atmospheric Effects

Today marked the real beginning of our rainy season. Back in my days in Los Angeles, my experience with rain was that it only happened for 2 weeks out of the year, and during those two weeks the roads turned into raging torrential rivers that could sweep away small trucks. The rest of the year was... well... you've seen the movies about L.A., right? It's actually like that. Frightening, but true.

In my years in Santa Cruz, I came to discover that there were these annually occuring things called "seasons", and that they offered varied forms of weather and temperature. It fascinated me greatly, and I learned all I could about this new concept. I discovered that Santa Cruz has four seasons: Spring, Tourist, Cold, and Rainy. The first major rain always seems to knock out the power. No one seems to know why, but Staci and I decided that it may have something to do with the way the power grids in Santa Cruz are wired to the same engineering protocols as your average Christmas tree.

So, to bring us back to today, the first real rain of the year. We lost power at work not just once, but twice. But both times the power resumed in less than a minute, but this was no surprise. It rarely lasted longer than that. Late in the day, however, a phone call from Staci revealed that the power had gone out at our house at roughly 3:30pm, and had not been back on since. She informed me that the road to our house was shut down with an impressive number of flares, and that a team of municipal electricians had invaded with large important looking trucks, and were dissuading people from "getting too close" to the power pole across the street from us. She was worried about a horrible high pitched noise that seemed to emanate from everywhere and yet nowhere, and she had gone so far as to unplug our smoke alarm before being driven to the ground in agony with her hands over her ears. Once it had finally stopped and her brain had stopped leaking from her eyes, she called me to see if I could find out what in god's name was going on.

A quick call to the "Power Watch" hotline revealed that our outage was "known" and that the cause was due to "equipment malfunction". I found this data to be in no way enlightening. It went on to say that the power was expected to resume by 7:45pm, so I relayed to Staci that she only had to sit in the dark alone for 2 more hours. She was thrilled. I arrived home at 10 pm in the evening to discover the last of the invading electricians packing up his important looking truck and preparing to drive away. I saw lights on in the house. All the flares had gone out. Everything seemed right in the universe. When I got inside, Staci informed me that the power had in fact come on only a half hour prior, and not at 7:45pm, and I could tell by the large quantity of melted wax on the table, that we would be needing to buy a lot more candles this rainy season.

And possibly a portable generator.