A Much Needed Snow Day

Astute readers will have noticed that I didn’t post anything on Friday. When the quarantine hit and school went online, I assumed my snow days were a thing of the past when it came to this semester. The weather gods had other ideas.

We got 9 inches of wet, heavy snow on Thursday night. (Some places in Maine got 20 inches!) This brought down power lines across the state, with much of my town losing electricity. Because of that, school was canceled for the day. The bad news is that power stayed out for a lot of the state for the entire weekend. Many of my friends didn’t get power back until yesterday, and I still have friends who are without power as I type this. (A situation that won’t be helped by the 50mph winds we’re supposed to be getting later today . . . )

Personally, we just lost power for about three hours, though we did have our internet go down until last night. For almost all of Friday, even the LTE network was down. (No power to the cell tower, perhaps? I don’t know how those operate.) And while it’s been a terrible situation for many, I have to say that personally, there were some definite perks.

Going all of Friday without being able to be online at all was just lovely. I’m already a self-confessed technology addict. That’s not always a good thing. In fact, in many ways this “work from home” thing has made me even more hooked on screens. Before, I could check my work email at all hours and not have to worry too much about coming across anything noteworthy unless it was a real emergency. Now, it seems like I might get “real” email at any time of the day, so checking email at 7pm might lead me to feel like I need to get work done right then.

24 hours without the internet was just what the doctor ordered. I didn’t even have to feel guilty about not checking: there was no way I could check, even if I wanted to. So instead, we played board games as a family and worked on Animal Crossing some when the power came on. In the evening, we watched blu-rays.

Up until then, I was beginning to feel very worn down. Discouraged. Friday was a great opportunity for me to catch my breath and feel more in control of things. (Again, my sincere apologies to the rest of my friends who had to go without power for so long. The only silver lining I can think of for you was that it wasn’t colder than it was, so (hopefully) no one had to worry about freezing pipes . . .)

Anyway. I’m back in the swing of things now, and I hope power comes back to the rest of you in the very near future. Pandemics, volcanoes, earthquakes, power outages, tornadoes. I keep looking out the window expecting it to be raining frogs. Maybe that’ll be later tonight . . .

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