A Day Like 2016

Due to July 4 being a Saturday, I have the week before and the week after off from classes since so many people are taking one or both weeks off for vacation. This has afforded me the luxury to live life like I used to before the mah Jongg craze took over.

Today was the most throw back day I have had in a long time. I started this morning with a great meeting with two fantastic food Bank of Central and Eastern NC employees, Cody and Emmy. They both started at the Food Bank long after I rolled off the board so this was our inaugural meeting. Having served on the board longer than any one person beside Ash Pipkin I had a lot of history and opinions to share with them.

It was a wonderful chance for me to catch up on the day-to-day goings on at my favorite non-profit. All my love for the mission of the Food Bank was right at the surface and I am looking forward to helping these big hearted young people.

Following that meeting I went to lunch with Lynn so we could rehash the wedding. We met at our usual Thai Cafe, where we have been having lunch together for over twenty years. I don’t know why they give us menus, we know it by heart and still only order the same thing every time.

By the time Lynn and I were almost done yakking, I noticed we were one of three tables. To my left were my old friends from Durham Magazine, Ellen and Rory. So we all got to talking and Ellen said she had just run across a copy of the “Collin Firth Issue.” We relived how it happened that I was able to get that big interview with Collin when the media relations department of his movie had said “No interviews” to everyone else.

Ellen told us that the “Collin” cover was the most highly read issue online to this day.

Spending time with Food Bank people, Durham Magazine people and Lynn all on the same day felt like a throw back to my life ten plus years ago. The nay difference is I just did not have to go to school pick up. I kind of miss school pick up.

If a Tree Falls in the Woods…Does it Mess up Everyone’s Day?

I woke up at 7:50 AM. Felt kind of late, but it was quiet. Russ, who rarely Sleeps pst 5:30 came in and announced, “The power has been out since 2:50.”

Yesterday, Russ finished the move out of his giant downtown office. Most of his team members live in other places and it was ridiculous to keep a twenty thousand square foot office. So welcome to working exclusively from home, without power.

I had a FaceTime private mah Jongg lesson scheduled with a UK student. I needed WiFi to have this lesson. Not ideal for me that Russ no longer had his office, where I could escape to and use his WiFi.

Russ had studied the Duke Energy outage map and told me that our whole neighborhood was out of power. So no calling a friend to use their power. Since we never open a refrigerator during a power outage Russ decided that Chick-fil-a was going to be the right thing for his and Shay’s breakfast. I was happy that was his choice as they have acceptable iced tea. For the record, Shay is very thin and we probably should be buying her a chicken biscuit everyday as she thought that was a mighty fine breakfast.

When Russ got home he told me it looked like the power was on at church. Ah-Ha. The answer. Our church has tons of classrooms that were not being used in the middle of a summer weekday. So I packed up my mah Jongg stuff and toddled over to church.

I was met by friendly staff who welcomed me in and I set up in room 105 and had a nice talk with pastor Thankam. She left me a few minutes before my call was to start. I started playing an online mah Jongg game as a warm up, but lost connection half way through the game.

Thankam came in room 105 and told me the power had gone off in the church. I had not noticed since I never turned the lights on in room 105. I texted my UK student and she generously pushed back our lesson.

I packed up and went home. Russ had discovered that the news found the culprit to the power outage. A tree had fallen across multiple transmission lines, in the dead of a calm, storm-free night.

What a pain, that we are so dependent on power that can be taken out by one tree. Thankfully, our power came back on at 12:15, 45 minutes earlier than Duke Energy predicted. It still was out for almost ten hours.

I was able to get my lesson in with my sweet student, who was so flexible. After a couple of hours I let Russ open the refrigerator. I have a very analog system for telling how warm the freezer has gotten during power outages and it worked perfectly this time.

I have a plastic pint container in the freezer filled with water that once it froze solid I place a penny on top of the ice. If the freezer gets warm enough that the ice melts the penny will sink and if the power comes back on and the water refreezes the penny will no longer be on the top of the ice. This way you can tell if your freezer ever got so warm that food might have spoiled and then refrozen.

Today the penny was still on the top of the ice. So keeping the refrigerator closed it was just like a giant cooler and all the frozen stuff in it was cold enough to keep itself cold enough.

The answer to the question about the tree, well it did not totally mess up my day, it could have been worse.