It stayed that way until 3:30am. It wasn't so bad at first, I sat and listened to the sounds of the hood, people screaming at each other, the dulcet tones of fire trucks and police sirens. The tweeker's next door playing Ozzy at full blast.
Wait..how in the hell can they be playing Ozzy at full blast???
I went flying over to their place and inquired as to their power situation since two transformers had just blown up. They had full power they said, through their toothless grins. Evidently they were on a different power grid than the rest of our block.
Fucking great. I asked them to either close their windows or turn that shit down, I wasn't in the mood to hear Ozzy right then as I didn't have any electricity and I wasn't tweeking my ass off like they had been doing for the last 36-48 hours.
They complied with my request. It might of been the clenched teeth or the look in my eyes, I dunno and I don't really care. I came back into the house and cursed how I had never kept my laptop battery charged correctly and that now it was a worthless hunk of metal.
I started texting friends and family. After they tired of me bugging them, I looked for something to read. Realizing I hadn't purchased a book in over a year, I gave up that idea quickly as I couldn't find it. I took the chihuahua, Goliath for a walk. I played with the cats for an hour until one of them tried to open up a vein. By then, it was getting dark.
Dark is really dark when you have no lights.
So I grabbed a flashlight I had dug out earlier in the day and looked around for candles again. All I found were some friggin tealights. Tealights are those damn tiny-assed candles that come in tin holders that don't light up shit. The cats thought I had found them some new toys and they commenced trying to bat the suckers around that I had lit and put on my desk and night stand.
I blew the worthless things out. When the sun goes down, the temperature starts dropping. I started putting more clothes on. I started cursing the gawds of electricity and PG&E(Pacific Gas&Electric). I then called PG&E and asked for an estimate of when they were going to have everything back up since we hadn't seen any of their guys at or near the blown out transformer yet and it was 6pm, 4 hours after the big bang.
Around 2-3am he said. I went off on the guy. He hung up on me. A transformer on a telephone pole is the size of a house trashcan, like one you typically have in the kitchen. We all called them immediately to tell them the location of the blown transformer so they wouldn't waste hours trying to figure out where the problem child was.
I then called one of the local tv channels, asking if they had any information. They said only 44 homes were still without power. Great, that meant only our block was still in the dark and I live in the ghetto. This means the power company could give a rat's ass when we get power, which explained why no one was working on our pole yet.
Fuckers...
I took my little flashlight and began walking back into my domain, the back of the house, and looked for my little bag of nature's medicinal. Found it! Used it.
Took a nap with the cats surrounding me like a furry blanket. When I awoke I grabbed my little flashlight and walked back up to the front of the house. The Ball n' Chain was watching TV. I looked to the back of the house from where I had just emerged and yes it was still black.
He had taken a long extension cord to the neighbors next door (its a duplex) and was running a lamp, his satellite box and his TV off their power. After telling him to stay as far away from me as possible(that cold he has that I do not want), I sat up there for awhile watching something stupid, conversing about how cold it was and sending him regularly outside to get updates from the PG&E crew that was standing around looking up at the telephone pole like they were waiting for their fairy godmother to fly up and fix it at any minute.
Needless to say, it was a very long, very cold night. I kept reminding myself that people in Haiti would love to be able to plug into their neighbors electricity and watch something stupid on their TV and have a lamp they can turn on at will.
That thought alone kept my bitching and complaining to a minimum.
