DISASTER DAY #4 - BACK ON THE GRID ... SORT OF

Day #4 dawns but I sleep until about seven a.m., which is a bit like a luxury after not sleeping much at all in the last three days.  The phone is still charged up, and I only had one flashlight going last night that needed a single battery change-over around three a.m.

My cell phone service is spotty at best without my own home internet connection up and running, but I have discovered that one spot in the house actually receives a signal where I can access the rest of the world.  Like the old television series "Jericho," I am completely without information, technology, and communication abilities as if an EMP has wiped out every technological frequency in the air.

I climb up the stairs and nestle in front of the window in my youngest son's bedroom in the front of the house.  I need to touch base with my oldest son whose family is in the thick of the hurricane in North Carolina.  How are you guys doing, I text to him.  Fine, he responds, how are YOU guys doing?  How is your house, I text to him.  He responds with How is YOUR house?  The entire situation is still completely unreal to me. As I text him, I notice that I have a strong signal, the strongest it has been since I got home Friday afternoon.  That's strange.  That means ...

Oh.  My.  God.

I run into my bedroom and see the clock is flashing.  Every single time power comes back on in this house, everything beeps and I can hear things springing back to electrical life, but this time, I hear no such pomp nor circumstance.  I zoom down the stairs into the kitchen and notice that random lights I left on when I fled are glowing.  Digital clocks are flashing.  I turn on the television.  Cable!  Internet!

Holy crap.  I'm back on the grid.

One thing I want to do before everything cools and freezes up again is wipe down the inside of the fridge and freezer.  Over the last few days, the melting and warming caused some leakage and the whole unit smells funky inside.  When I'm done, I adjust the temperature, make sure everything is working, and begin the exciting process of creating ice cubes.   

Dear Lord!  Ice cubes.  I'm going to have ICE CUBES!

I am suddenly singing in my head the song from Bye Bye Birdie, "Ed Sullivan," but instead the words are, "Frozen ice cubes!  Frozen ice cubes!  We're gonna have ... frozen ice cubes!!!!!"  I promised myself that when power came back on, I'd open the cava and have a celebratory glass of bubbly.  I open the cooler (cannot put anything away until the temperature gets to the safe zone) and pull out the small, single-serving bottle I've been saving for this moment.  I don't care that it's eight-thirty in the morning.  It's noontime somewhere, damnit, and I have electricity.


The sun is shining and the temperature is going into the low eighties today, so I warm up bowls of water in the sun outside to add to microwaved bowls of water to make enough for a lukewarm bath.  I don't worry about my hair -- I stick my head under a cold faucet to do that, but a warmish bath is pleasant on a hot day.

It's like Heaven in my house at the moment.  I have lights, I have the fridge back, I have internet service, and I saved the food and alcohol that I would've lost had I not come back into the Red Zone illegally on Friday afternoon.  I may not have any gas heat or gas cooking or gas hot water, but I'VE GOT THE POWER!

Of course, at this point I am still naive enough (or, perhaps delusional enough) to believe I will be back on the gas grid, too, within mere days.  For the umpteenth time since this gas-related horror started, I am going to be wrong, wrong, wrong, and not just marginally wrong but monumentally wrong.