By the light of the silvery moon

I had forgotten how much I don't like power failures. I grant that I suppose there aren't many people who do like them, but the thing is I lived long enough in Singapore where there just aren't power failures to talk about that I got out of the habit of expecting them. Despite various provocations I only experienced one power failure my half-decade there; back in the United States, I've experienced several within the year and a half I've been here.

I mentioned the short power failure last week. It lasted roughly long enough for us to go around turning off appliances in order not to be blasted with light and sound when power came back on. Well, last night, we had a more serious one, in the midst of a real solid thunderstorm. Of course my laptop battery was charged up, so I was able to do some writing for various things, but it did mean waiting in anxiety for power and Internet access to post my daily compulsion here and a couple of other things I simply Must Do Every Day. And since the wind was heavily kicked up we had to close all the windows, so the house grew in its not-quite-heat-wave temperature stuffiness while, outside, the patio umbrella was blown off to parts unknown.

In fact, when I got up -- a couple hours later than I ordinarily would have; apparently I sleep to the clock which I don't watch -- my mother asked if I had seen the umbrella being blown away. Well, no: it was after dark, after all, that the storm happened. And there was the blackout. (After the storm moved through it was surprisingly non-dark, though -- the moon as transmitted through the clouds meant the sky was bright enough to see the ground by.) I did go over to the screen door to see that the patio umbrella was not there, although my mother pointed out there wasn't anything to see, and, truth be told, I couldn't identify our patio umbrella unless there happened to be a spot labelled with our name and address and I were to see that. It was, in fact, not there, and apparently nobody saw it go.

Trivia: The P&O Steam Navigation Company was granted its coat of arms on 16 June 1937. Source: The Story of P&O, David Howarth, Stephen Howarth.

Currently Reading: Challenge To Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945 - 1974, Asif A Siddiqi.