17 September 1999 7:00 AM - Shortly after I finished typing yesterday, the power went out. For a while, this was not much of a problem, since it was still light enough to see. I read my book and Matt paced.

At one point, I opened the front door to take a picture or two of the lashing trees. Fifteen minutes later, a ferocious gust blew the door open again. We realized later that I hadn't shut the door hard enough to actually click the lock into place, but for a while we prepared to curse the builder up one side and down the other.

Matt decided to see if the phone was still working, and picked up the cordless - which wouldn't turn on. Oh, yeah; the base unit has no power. (We spent a lot of time doing that: I think I'll fix myself some toast - no wait... Well then, I'll make some popcorn - hold it... Okay, then I'll just watch a movie...) So anyway, he went upstairs and picked up the phone on the desk. Just as he was about to curse the dead air, he heard a voice: "Hello?" He'd managed to pick up just as Jeff was calling to check on us.

Around 12:30, I wandered into the kitchen and saw that the wall over the stove was streaked and the paint bubbling. As I got closer, I saw thin streams of water pouring from under the stove hood. I looked long enough to figure out that the wind was lifting the vent flaps on the outside of the house and shoving the rain through, which then dripped down the edge of the hood. I duct-taped some paper towels to to the edge of the hood, and made a mental note to remember next time we're expecting a major storm to go outside and tape the vent shut.

By 1:00, the rain had slowed to a drizzle, though the wind remained fierce. Having finished my book and with nothing else to do, I went upstairs to take a nap.

I had been jotting down these little events on a slip of paper so I would remember to write about them here. Matt jotted down, while I was sleeping, that at 2:35 the street traffic resumed. We live at the end of a cul-de-sac - which (in case you haven't heard the term before) is a dead-end street with a turnaround at the end of it. Why so many cars feel compelled to drive down these roads, I'll never know. I'm not talking about the slow, hesitant drivers who are obviously looking for a particular house they've never been to before. And there's nothing on our cul-de-sac to inspire sight-seeing. But at least every half hour or so, a car will drive smartly down to the end of the street, turn around, and drive just as smartly back out. I don't get it. But Matt's note says that the first cul-de-sac cruiser came by around 2:35, while I was napping.

I woke up around 3:30 with the realization that we hadn't heard the phone ring when Jeff called because two of our three phones require electricity for basic functions, and the one "normal" phone wasn't plugged into a working jack. Matt took that phone downstairs and plugged it in, but came back to report that the line had gone dead, so it was a moot point.

Around 4:00, we were seeing glimpses of sunlight, and the wind had started blowing more gently and from a different direction. Matt complained of boredom, and at my suggestion we fished out the Star Wars Trivial Pursuit game he'd been given for Christmas. We played two games (each winning one) but then stopped because the questions were either absurdly simple for any sort of Star Wars fan (Who said "We seem to be made to suffer. It's our lot in life,"? - C3PO, for those of you who aren't fans), or absurdly obscure (What alien language was created by combining African and South Pacific dialects? - Ewokese).

By then, we were hungry. We decided to pack up a little food and head down to my folks' house - the wind had mostly died down, the streets were dry, and it was possible (if unlikely) that my folks had power. We stopped at the Farm Fresh on our way out - they had a generator running, and were operating with harried employees. The interstate was dry and clear until just south of Williamsburg, when we ran into a traffic jam at near-stop, tooling along at about 3 miles per hour. Eventually we saw why: All traffic was being diverted down one exit.

At the end of the exit, we discovered they had blocked off one of the possible directions; there would be no going back to Williamsburg, and must continue on toward my parents' place. But after another half mile of only slightly-faster traffic, it became clear that this stretch of raod was open only far enough to allow vehicles to turn around and go back to Williamsburg via the interstate. So we turned around.

We drove the length and breadth of the city, and found a lone island of electricity about two miles from our neighborhood. Aside from a hotel, though, nothing was open. As we were pulling into our neighborhood, we decided on one last stop - our friends Chuck and Anita live about half a mile from our house, so we thought we'd drive by and see if they had any lights on. We saw candlelight glowing in their windows, so we stopped and knocked on the door. We sat and chatted with them for an hour or so (ah! human contact!) before Matt started getting sleepy (he hadn't had a nap, after all) and we headed home.

With no other lights to confound them, the stars seemed to have multiplied and dipped closer to the earth. You could even see the pale band of the Milky Way, and I glimpsed the bucket of the Big Dipper in a break in the trees. If we hadn't been so tired when we got home, I might have sat on the porch steps a while and just looked.

This morning, as I predicted, is mild and beautiful. Matt had made some talk about going in to the office even if the power isn't restored, if only for the human contact. We need to wait until at least 9:30 or 10, though, in case the plumber actually keeps his appointment. (With no phone, there has been no way for us to confirm the appointment or for them to call to cancel it.)

2:30 PM - As expected, the plumber didn't show. Matt and I left the house around 10 to come in to the office, and were astonished to find almost everyone had come in. The office has power and phone lines, though not an Internet connection. I took advantage of the phone line to call my parents and K.T. and let them all know that Matt and I were all right, knowing that they would have tried to call us yesterday evening after everything cleared up, and been worried when they couldn't get through. I had assumed that they would have just heard the phone ringing over and over. Dad told me that there was actually a message: "The number you have reached, XXX-XXX-XXXX, is being changed. The new number may have not been selected. Please try again later." HUH???? I dialed it myself, and sure enough... How peculiar.

K.T. reassured me that Sara had made it through just fine, though she's got a bit of mildew in her house. She also suggested that if Matt and I were still planning on going up to D.C. for T's comic book wrap party and the comic con that we try to contact T at his parents' house in Virginia Beach to see if the wrap party is still a go.

I spent some time contacting Bell Atlantic and Virginia Power, to make sure that our neighborhoods were on their repair lists. It took forever to get through to Bell Atlantic. I kept getting "circuits are full" messages. Heh. Sortof ironic, calling the phone company... Anyway, we're told we should have phone service by sometime this evening, but the power company still didn't have an estimate for our electricity. I told Matt that if the power wasn't back on this evening, then I wanted to go down to my folks' house tonight (the road is clear again - my dad made it to work up here in Williamsburg this morning) so we can at least take a shower! Especially if we're going to be driving to D.C. tomorrow.

The thing that strikes me, in the midst of all this, is how nice everyone is making an effort to be. The evacuated woman in front of us in line at the Farm Fresh was laughing with us over peculiar marketing schemes. The extremely harried employee at the Farm Fresh who seemed to have an extra set of arms, he moved so fast (ringing and bagging the groceries with one set, taking money and making change with the other) actually took the time to say "Have a nice evening" before lunging for the next pile of groceries. The customer service people at both Bell Atlantic and Virginia Power, who I'm sure have been fielding calls from frustrated and irritable people all day, were calm and polite and careful to give me as much information as they possibly could. The woman with VA Power even laughed a little over the confusion. People at the office who have also been without power and phone were sympathetic with us, and by unspoken agreement, no one is complaining about our lack of showers because (like talking about hot weather) thinking about it just makes it worse. Jeremy agreed to drive Matt and I back to our house after lunch so we could check on the state of our phone and power and see if there was any food in the freezer that was salvageable (we had planned to bring it back to the office and put it in the office's freezer until our power came back).

The unspoken consensus is, things could have been worse - let's be grateful for what didn't happen. Or perhaps, things are bad enough - let's make an effort not to make them worse. Or maybe both, I don't know. But even without understanding it, I find myself making sure to smile and stop to ask how things are going and commiserate and be pleasant. How come it's so hard the rest of the time for people to get along?

Del, who is Jeremy's and my supervisor, didn't come in today, though he lives in Williamsburg and almost certainly has a clear drive. Jeremy and I are theorizing that a whole day without any kind of phone, pager, e-mail, or other access put him into shock.