As unlikely as it seems, I am now one of the many victims of Hurricane Ike, whose windy tendrils extended into Louisville yesterday to knock out electricity for more than 300,000 homes.
We were told this morning that it is estimated to take between 10 and 14 days for complete restoration of power to the area, as many local emergency responders were in Texas helping relief efforts at the front.
Thank goodness it is but a mere inconvenience for us, as of course many others were much harder hit with more serious consequences. Makes you realize how small this ole world really is... and how we should take better care of it.
Update 09/21: Power to our neighborhood was restored at 11 a.m. this morning, just about one full week after it dropped.
Fun parts of all this: spending more time talking with family, reading books together, making up stories for each other, interacting with neighbors, going to bed early, letting fresh outdoor air run through the house, going for walks, spending lots of time in the dark listening to the MP3 player with the good headphones.
Bad parts: tolerating intolerable AM talk radio programs obviously catered to stupid people just to get snatches of local news during the commercial breaks, having to wait nearly a week to see the most recent episode of Mad Men.
1 comment:
Amen, J!
I got a taste of our "small world" and saw with clarity how non-exempt any of us are from disaster/calamity/tragedy when I was on my first Katrina relief trip.
We were working in an uppper middle-class sub-division...helping an elderly lady repaint the interior of her home after another team had gutted and dry-walled it.
On a break, we walked around the cul-de-sac to look at, and take pictures of, the damage to other houses. Debris still littered the streets and clothes and other things were still hanging from some of the trees. (This was in January after Katrina hit in August.)
There was a piece of something broken laying at the edge of the street--as I looked more closely at it, I realized it was a shard of broken pottery...a chunk of a pitcher identical to one that I had at home.
That was a real epiphany for me...this was no third world country or impoverished inner city (ie, something to which I couldn't relate). These were people just like me in a neighborhood just like mine. I could have been the one that teams of people from all over the world were coming to help.
It was sobering...but good. Those kinds of things kind of equal the playing field and make you realize that we really need to learn how to play together, because you just never know...
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