New Year's Fun

My power went out today for about an hour. There was a delay between the lights going off and the sound of the transformer blowing of about a half-second. Normal speed of sound is 344m/s, so I'll guesstimate the problem came from about 200 meters away (or about an eighth of a mile for you non-geeks), and sounded to me like it came from the southeast, putting the blown transformers here:




I may have to hike over there later today to see if those are really transformers and if any evidence of recent work on them has been done. Alternatively, I could sign onto work and see if any AEP trouble tickets for this area have been entered, however most of the lines in town are owned by Westerville's utility department and not AEP, so I might have to put my shoes on to go check it out.

The Christmas trip down to North Carolina was good. I wrote a CQ article that detailed one thing I witnessed. Stacey was glad to see the family down there, especially Grandma and Great-grandma. It's nice that Stacey has had a relationship with her great-grandmother. I met mine only a couple of times as a boy before she died. My memories of her are few, but I saw the respect and deference given to her by older relatives such as my grandmother and grandfather, and it struck me as curious. Stacey has had a strong relationship with her great-grandmother (and is well liked by the other 16 of the family down there, and is known on sight by most of the roughly 150 family members attending our annual family reunions). She's a lot more engaged with them than I was at her age, which makes me very happy.

This week we've been recovering from our trip, playing games we got as Christmas presents (my favorite being Marvel Comics Monopoly, her's being the stand-alone console game Dream Life), seeing Pursuit of Happyness (++good), attending a modest sized alcohol-free New Year's Eve party, and cooking breakfast over a match-lit gas stove while the power was out.

At work all the year-end projects got done on time, despite my getting a last minute project in early December, and three projects that a co-worker couldn't complete because she was out on sick leave. My boss is happy, and the bonuses come March should be decent, both nice, but both paling in comparison to quality time I've had for the last two weeks with my daughter, mother, grandmother, aunt, uncle, cousins, cousins-in-law, and their children.

All that plus the long weekend, and I'm ready to tackle the menial chores of life with full vigor come Tuesday.