B E B E R E

What an odd day! First my machine started having seizures. I took it over to the IT lab for them to look into - still there right now as far as I know. Ended up having to wander around the building asking people when they were going to lunch so that I could quick! run reports on the ledger from their machines and send them to mine (a box with Office and nothing else) to format. About an hour before closing, got a general alert that we were going on lockdown due to a phoned-in threat. This sort of thing isn't totally unexpected, given the field we work in. Still, it's kind of disconcerting to have the police around in the office and not know what's going on. Again, for all I know, we may well spend another day in this state. We'll see.

The crowning glory, though, was making it home after my wander in the somewhere-above-95 degree range temperatures to find that all the power on my street had gone out. My neighbor Rosie said that it was cut at about five.

At about 7:30-8:00 (couldn't tell; didn't have a working clock), a couple of guys in an NStar truck came and started unloading a big, gray box (a transformer? I don't know) from the cab and set about to replacing the one currently up the pole. Fascinating work. Finished with that, they went to the next pole down the street and fiddled with that for a bit. We had thunderstorms predicted, but mercifully, it only spit for a while.

Was amazing how the entire neighborhood was out watching these guys do their job. One fellow would pass around tools, the other would ascend and descend on this giant, manoeuverable arm. Such cherries for him to pick, though! (Could never do his job.) I made mention to one neighbor across the street that, though it seemed sad for us to be out like this on such a hot night, that porch stoop socializing was the norm before people got all dependent on things like TV and the innernet. He agreed. His partner (a mechanical engineer) and I admired the electricians prowess with their tools for a while and, when we finally got power up again (11/2 hours after the NStar guys arrived), we started a round of applause, hollering thanks and declaring that, for all intents and purposes, they were much, much better than rock stars.

Returned to the house to turn on the fans and fix the clocks, then went back outside to pass another hour with Raphaella and Rosie.