4.5 Hours without Power (and Being Forced to Do Business with a Convicted Murderer)

We had a power outage last night. Around 9pm the lights went out. 30 seconds later they came back on for a moment then died again. Moments later, another quick flicker on then off.

"Oh, that's not good," I remarked mostly to myself. When the power comes on briefly after an outage then snaps back off it usually indicates that the system tried to bridge from one main to another— and failed. And when such failures happen they are more difficult, costly, and time-consuming to fix.

Indeed it did take a while for the power to come back on. Hawk says the lights came back on around 2am. PG&E, our utility company and a convicted murderer 💀, reports on its website that the outage was fixed at 1:30am. Of course, convicted murderer PG&E was also still texting me as late as 6:30am that the estimated fix would be completed at 4pm today. 🤣

This 4½ ~ 5 hour outage wasn't too inconvenient for us. When it hit at 9pm we were already winding down for the night. We stayed up together until 11, surfing the web on our computers on battery power, tethering to our phones for network. We saw on convicted murderer PG&E's site that the outage affected several blocks around us, but apparently not wherever the cell towers are.

Actually it was amusing using convicted murderer PG&E's outage side. It's one of the first things I thought to do; check the site for known outages and report ours. The site said, "Nope, your power is ON!" So I clicked the button to report, "Nuh-uh, it's OFF." And they gave me a spinning ball icon while they said, "We're checking your power meter." Seconds after I clicked the button on my browser, Hawk got a text from convicted murderer PG&E (her name is on the bill to pay for power and murders) "AN OUTAGE HAS BEEN REPORTED IN YOUR AREA". Meanwhile I was still getting the spinning ball icon for another 30 seconds until convicted murderer PG&E said, "Yup, you're right, your power's out." 🤣

Anyway, it wasn't too inconvenient for us. We were basically like, "The power's out, what a shame. Well, anyway...."

Years ago there would've been a scramble to find flashlights. That issue was mooted by the fact we already carry flashlights with us constantly. They're our cellphones! Hawk still wanted me to tell her where all the flashlights in the house are. We do have several in various places. I navigated downstairs by the light of my cellphone to retrieve a less-powerful flashlight for her.

Another "now vs. then" difference is that power outages are so much less common nowadays. When I was a kid, in a different part of the country, we'd have outages at least once a year, usually in the summer during rough weather. Here in Silicon Valley they're rare. A quick search through my blog shows a 14-minute outage 2 years ago and a 30-second outage in 2017. There have been other outages in between those two, but typically not lasting more than a few seconds. At 4½ ~ 5 hours this one was extremely long. Even the notorious rolling blackouts of 2001 only hit us for about an hour at a time.

Chattanooga Choo Choo LIED to Me!

Lately I've had an earwig of The Chattanooga Choo Choo, the 1941 song performed Glenn Miller and His Orchestra. Y'know, the Big Band Sound classic that goes

Pardon me, boy
Is that the Chattanooga Choo-Choo?
Yes, yes (Track 29!)
Boy, you can give me a shine

I'm not sure why this song has been stuck in my head the past few days. I've never been a fan of Big Band music. My partner's dad was, though, and she has some of the classics from that era loaded on her music player. Maybe that's where I heard it.

Anyway, I was singing the lyrics to myself the other day, and I choked after the second stanza.

You leave the Pennsylvania station about a quarter to four
Read a magazine and then you're in Baltimore
Dinner in the diner
Nothing could be finer
Than to have your ham and eggs in Carolina

So the first few lines of this stanza are okay. ...Though from Pennsylvania Station— which is in New York— to Baltimore (where the main station is also called Penn Station, BTW), likely with a few stops along the way, via 1940-era train, it's about 3 hours. So that must be a pretty engrossing magazine. 🤣 But the real problem comes with breakfast (presumably, for ham and eggs) in Carolina. That's where I choked on it.

Famous orchestra leader and musical liar Glenn Miller

You see, I lived and traveled the first 25 years of my life in the mid-Atlantic region. I was picturing the route on a map as I sang the lyrics to myself, and I was like, "WTF? You would not travel south from Baltimore to, say, Raleigh (or even Durham), then west to Chattanooga!"

There are two big problems with routing that way. One, that's way longer than traveling down the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia and crossing directly into Tennessee at the state line town of Bristol. I fully understand that rails don't always traverse the shortest route between two points; costs of construction and operation matter a lot. But that's problem number Two: the route described in the song requires rails crossing the steep Appalachian Mountains in western North Carolina. Not only is that route 200 miles longer, those miles are way more costly to traverse.

A quick Google search confirmed my objections. The actual train service from NYC to Chattanooga, TN did pass through Baltimore but then jogged west, over to the Shenandoah Valley, then followed that southwest through Virginia and across the border into Tennessee. It followed the same route as modern day interstate I-81. It never entered North Carolina.

As a historical note, the original interstates were often built along the same routes as railroads through mountain passes. That's why the route the rail followed in 1940 looks a lot like the route you'd drive today. That's also why I-40, which does cross through the mountains of western NC, was one of the last of the originally planned interstates to be completed.

BTW, this breakfast-in-Carolina lie isn't the only falsehood Glenn Miller peddled in his famous song. 🤣 That "Track 29!" call-response in the first stanza? In 1940 Pennsylvania Station had only Tracks 1-21. And among the three trains that went to /through Chattanooga, none departed at 3:45. 💩