Chaos to Cosmos
The path from chaos to cosmos was discovered by telling one's life story

Tuesday 20 September 2005

Wind Power

You can never get any when you need it ... Though, the dog finished off the remains of my lentil stew yesterday and today, she could power the national grid. Stinky! Actually, that's not the kind of wind I was talking about (and, yes, I know that American viewers call that gas and what you also call gas, we call petrol and, we could go round in circles all day "getting lost in translation"), but last week I could have done with any sort of power - period.

We had significant outages on three separate days, culminating on Friday evening with a three hour power cut. Then, just when the power had been back on long enough to start the computer and re-load the work I was planning on doing ... *poof* and it was gone again. Half an hour later, process repeated and off it went for the third time.

When I have no power, there is NOTHING whatsoever I can do. 

The house is too dark for my poor old eyes to read regular books (remember those?), even in daytime. No TV, no computer, no coffee (panic). Even my ISDN phone line doesn't work without electricity. For the first time, I got quite concerned about the isolation. This is when living alone in the middle of absolutely nowhere starts to look less appealing, even a little scary.

I can understand when the power invariably goes off during storms or high winds, because this always badly affects the overhead power lines, but there were no such weather conditions last week. As it was peak evening hours, I harbour a suspicion that the current system just ain't up to coping with growth. 

Maybe I'll just have to feed the dog more beans?