Just an ordinary day at work...until the power failed about 8:15 (apparently something fried at the substation, which seems to be a common occurrence in DeKalb County; when I lived there we had at least one power outage a week). We lost everything; we had APCs on all our computers at one time, but they never worked properly--good ol' lowest bidder!--although the units remaining spent the next hour or so beeping pathetically until our LAN specialist turned them off.

Luckily I had brought a book with me, and at first sat under the emergency light reading. But the emergency light got dimmer and dimmer and I finally picked up and moved. A lot of folks have "use or lose" annual leave at this time of the year, so I just found an empty window office and continued reading.

We're often told there's a rule that if the power doesn't come back on after an hour, they're supposed to dismiss us. Well, after three hours someone finally came around saying we could go. As I went back to my desk, the power came back on. (Obviously I didn't get out the door fast enough. :-) But it was kinda hard to find my things in a perfectly dark cubicle.) So I rebooted my computer and sat back down.

Soon my supervisor appeared. "The dismissal is still in force," he said. Turned out it would take at least 2 hours to get the servers back up. Needless to say I didn't let grass grow under my feet.

It wasn't a bad afternoon. I did some errands--picking up prescriptions at Kaiser and perusing both Home Depot and Lowe's for a new freestanding cupboard for the kitchen (oh, and buying new halogen bulbs for the living room fixture; the notation on the box says "Lasts 1 1/2 years!"--uh-huh, two of the three lasted all of seven months...)--and "did" two Borders and two Barnes & Nobles. Cool! Three web design books on sale! I also noticed The Legend of Holly Claus is half price. It's gotten some nice reviews, so I'm going to go back and get a copy.

And I finally found the January issue of Yankee magazine. I was, in a word, upset. For the past two or three years, this issue of Yankee has come with a small calendar of New England scenes. I use it on my computer desk to note which paychecks of mine go for which payments, and also when the trash collection day is different than the usual Monday and Thursday. When we were visiting my mom last month, I saw several small calendars with New England scenery, but didn't buy them because I knew I would get my calendar in Yankee.

Not. It has a booklet about herbs, which, while very interesting, just isn't the same. I grabbed a small lighthouse calendar at one of the bookstores instead...but damn, I'm gonna miss the fall scenes and snowscapes.

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 7:06:00 PM

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