Crisis of Inconvenience Averted

No doubt you heard the news, I couldn’t watch the Packers/Saints game last night.  Couldn’t watch anything on television.  Nor could my neighbors or anyone else in the trapezoid that stretches from San Diego to Tijuana, to Yuma and San Juan Capistrano.  It was a simple matter of lights out as a result of the largest blackout in California history.

Battery powered radios provided connections to news talk shows that buzzed with speculation, hyperbole and no small amount of ignorance shared by commentators and their callers.  Some hinted and others seemed to hope that terrorism was to blame.  If anything was revealed in this exercise, it was how absolutely misleading and useless news media coverage would be in the event of a real emergency.  Listening to these people yesterday was less enlightening and more annoying than the buzz we are forced to endure during those periodic tests of the Emergenecy Broadcasting System.

With the power down I retrieved some camp lanterns from the garage and the one I hung over the patio table provided enough light for Andrea to beat the tar out of me in a Mexican Train Dominos death match.  With no television or computer to babysit us our heads hit our pillows at a respectable hour.  Sometime while we slept the power was restored in time to save the half gallon of chocolate ice cream reserved for my nightly root beer floats.

I opened the newspaper with my morning cup of coffee to find that they caught the terrorists – a power company crew that was working on faulty equipment in Yuma.