Day 4

 

Tree?  What tree?  You mean that pile of logs in the foreground?

Everything's always better the next day after a night's sleep and some time for the brain to adjust to the new reality.  Things might still suck, but at last they don't suck as bad as they seemed to the day before 

I got to thinking about the resources that I have at my disposal and how I can utilize them.  My roof might immediately need some blue tarp on it to keep any future rain out, but I live in an awesome neighborhood and my brand-new next-door neighbor just so happens to be in the commercial roofing business.  He doesn't do residential houses, per se, but he knows people who do and he made some phone calls on my behalf yesterday and before you know it, I had a tree-clearing firm lined up to remove the tree this morning and put the tarp on my roof.  I also had some of his roofing-specialists contacts and disaster-recovery guys over to look at things and begin to develop quotes on rebuilding what's left.  Thanks, good neighbor!  Here's what's left of that goddamn tree:

Fall on my house and I'll put you out on the curb like last week's trash.

The power is still out, some 36 hours now as I write this with no calvary in sight.  Trees are down all over the neighborhood and although only mine hit a house, most took down power lines.  But Collier Road, a major east-west route in this area and access to the interstate for Piedmont Hospital, has been blocked by two fallen trees since early Thursday morning, and no one's even working on it.  Georgia Power's current prediction is we'll have our electricity restored by 7:00 pm on November 1, two whole days from now. Not a good situation and there's not even a single work crew to be seen in the area.  

Living alone, there are only so many things you can do in a powerless home.  One, drink.  There's that, but I've been abstaining thinking that if a new crisis comes up, me being drunk won't help much (that and there's no ice and I can't keep beer cold).  Two, try to read by candlelight.  Trust me, it doesn't work very well.  Three, stare straight ahead into black, empty space  examining your thoughts.  Years of Zen training have prepared me for that one, but I wouldn't recommend it to the uninitiated.  Four, play around with your iPhone until the batteries run out.  Not recommended if the power won't be restored to recharge the battery for the next day.

But then I remembered another resource at my disposal.  I have a gadget, I called it the "doo-hickey," that converts an automobile cigarette lighter to a USB port, so I can recharge my phone using my car.  There.  One problem solved.  What next?

Well, even playing around on a rechargeable iPhone alone in the dark gets old after a while (you can only check your Facebook status so many times), and besides, all the food in my refrigerator is starting to spoil.  But I have another resource - the unsellable condo in Vinings, Georgia that's empty right now, but has power, heat, a working refrigerator and microwave, and so on.  All the comforts of home, except, um, furniture.  I'm there now, typing this on my laptop on a kitchen counter, accessing the internet via a wifi hot spot set up using my phone. I just reheated and ate some of the casserole I made on Wednesday, before the world ended, and when I'm good and ready after posting this, I'll go back to my dark house and go straight to bed to prepare for another fun day (Halloween!) of solving problems and dealing with the home-wrecking capabilities of Hurricane Zeta.