From My Diary

Sunday, February 21, 2021

The whole house reeks like a campfire.

We were one household of many whose power went out Thursday in the early hours of the morning. This was not entirely unexpected, since we’d been following news of the eastward-moving winter storm which did similar things in Texas earlier in the week. I woke up shortly after the power went out, lit a fire, and moved food into ice chests; but I didn’t wake any of the rest of the household, since it was still fairly warm inside. Later that day, we moved mattresses into the front room—where the fireplace is—and mostly stayed there day and night. It was a fairly boring few days until the power came back on this afternoon, but overall not a great hardship.

It was definitely annoying to get up every couple hours in the night to tend the fire, though.

One thing that did become clear while we were sitting around there in the front room was that there were things we could have done to be better prepared for this particular scenario. I doubt if we will do many, if any, of those things, though—it’s not worth the time, money, and effort to fully prepare for such an uncommon event.

Still, it prompted me to reflect on how fortunate I am—how fortunate we are—compared to past generations, just in a purely physical sense. It is tempting to view this progress as an unalloyed good. But I also note that I and my wife talked with our neighbors to a much greater degree during this crisis than we usually do, that everyone I ran into actually seemed interested in the answer to the usually purely formal and nominal pleasantry of “How are you doing?”, that my friends stopped by to bring us things we hadn’t even asked for, on the grounds that “You might need this.”