Not everything about losing power is bad. It's easier to get to bed on time when there's no electric lights and a dozen forms of electricity-dependent entertainment waiting for you. People sleep better without LEDs all over the house lighting things up and street lights pouring through the shades.
Then there's the fact that situations like this bring out the best in most people and we get the opportunity to see neighbors and strangers doing good.
And then there's the greater family togetherness when everyone's not in different rooms pursuing separate hobbies. On that front, check the papers nine months from now for news of a baby boom in the affected areas.
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In the '90s I started making a solar cooker after reading how in The Tightwad Gazette; I made the mistake of starting before I had all my supplies gathered, and I ended up abandoning the project. Every summer since, when I'd ponder whether having some particular dish was worth heating up the oven (and thus the kitchen), I'd wish I'd finished it. While we were without electricity, I really wished I had a solar oven. With one, we could have had normal meals; had our tap water been contaminated, we could even have used the solar cooker to boil water, instead of relying on bleach.
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I discovered that, when cooking on the grill, I could get two meals from one portion of charcoal. When I took the cooked food off the grill as usual, I put a lidded, all-metal pot with food inside in the grill and shut the lid. Four or five hours later, the food was cooked. You're a bit limited in what you can cook this way (especially if you only own one all-metal, lidded pot), but any hot food makes a change from peanut butter sandwiches or summer sausage and canned fruit.
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I learned that if you paint the sides of a can of soup with non-toxic black spray paint and put the can in the sun for a few hours in the middle of the day, you can have hot soup without cooking.
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I was surprised how quickly the human body adapts to heat. Mississippi writer Jack Butler once described our summers as a hundred days at a hundred degrees and a hundred percent humidity; trust me, we usually make abundant use of the air-conditioning and electric fans, and I've never gone more than a few days without electricity--that time was from Hurricane Frederick, when I was a child. Tuesday and Wednesday sweat poured off me all day (Monday was relatively cool because of the storm), but on Thursday I felt much more comfortable and on Friday I was perfectly comfortable. It has made me rethink our use of air-conditioning and my reluctance to walk anywhere during the day in summer because "it's too hot".
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In our society it's easy to live cut off from your community--not participating in local events, shopping outside of your area, preferring national or world news to local news--most of the time, but in a natural disaster local news and resources become highly valued.
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It's amazing how used we are to having news--local, national, & international--available at the flip of a switch. Lying in the dark Wednesday night, I felt very cut-off. No long-distance phone service, no cell phones working, no electricity for internet or TV news, some area radio stations down, no newspapers, no mail. At that point people were sending messages with people driving out of town--a bit like runners or troubadours carrying news. Things quickly began normalizing--a satellite phone was found, more people bought generators as they came into town, the local newspaper got out an edition, the long-distance service came back on Friday, and so on. But for the first couple of days, we were in a more old-fashioned state, and it felt odd.
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I gained a newfound appreciation for the electric washing machine--specifically its ability to wring out the water from clothes.
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It's odd to go into a grocery store and all the refrigerated sections are empty and there's no produce (or only cabbage and a small amount of fruit), nothing but non-perishable food. It wouldn't seem odd if we weren't such a prosperous country that we have been able to take stores full of all the food we want, whenever we want, with no waiting (other than the line to pay), for granted. It is so ordinary to us that I sound dorky for mentioning it, but it really is an amazing thing to waltz into a grocery store any time we want and know it will almost certainly have everything we want. It beats the heck out of waiting in line to buy bread, a la the former Soviet Union.
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Unexpected pleasures are even better than they would be usually. When you weren't expecting to have tea at all, sun tea (I prefer brewed) made from inferior quality tea and poured over the last of the ice from your rapidly thawing freezer can be more enjoyable than good tea is usually.
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I've changed a lot with age and becoming Catholic. Two things recently brought that home to me. We went through distribution lines several times to get ice (you couldn't buy ice at the store), and one of the centers was set up to get people through as quickly as possible, so we couldn't tell them we only needed ice, not food, without stopping the line. I felt bad about taking food other people needed more, but once upon a time it would have hurt my pride even to take the charity ice.
Second thing was that, after I found out about the horrible things that had been happening in New Orleans (when long-distance service returned Friday), I was able to offer genuine prayers for the souls of the people terrorizing their fellow citizens. I've always been a little more attached to the "some people need killin' " school of thought than befits a Catholic and, as I'm not a naturally forgiving person, my prayers for my enemies have usually begun with a prayerful request that I be able to mean the prayer. People who prey on other people after a natural disaster are the lowest of the low and I think they should be dealt with harshly to discourage others from doing the same, but they, like all of us, are souls in need of divine mercy and I'm glad that I was able to mean it when I prayed for them.
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I know it's fashionable to criticize capitalists, but there's nothing like having no stores open for two days (and then only a few open for another few days) to give you an appreciation for them. And as for the ones who opened up here before they got generators up and running and had to let only a few customers into their darkened stores at a time and "ring them up" by writing barcodes down on a piece of paper for later entry into their computer systems, it's hard to think it was a purely monetary decision on the part of the managers. I may sound naive, but considering how inconvenient the whole thing was for the stores and how their regular sales were diminished by only being able to allow a few people in at a time, it's hard not to think there was some idea of providing a service behind it.
I know the idea of service inspired the local radio station, which operated for a week without advertisements, just so people could hear local news--things like whether we need to boil water, a local nurse is driving to a dialysis unit north of us and can carry passengers who need dialysis, that sort of thing.
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MREs are wonderful! I'd only ever heard of them in the context of complaints, but having sampled a couple, I think that either the quality has improved greatly or the complaints were coming from soldiers who got tired of having only MREs for too long. Each MRE has an entree, a snack (such as bread and cheese or peanut butter and crackers), a dessert, an instant drink mix, salt, sugar and creamer if the instant drink was coffee, a tiny container of hot sauce or packet of pepper, two pieces of breath-freshening gum, a high-quality plastic spoon, paper napkins and a moist towelette. The entree is heated in an ingenious little pack, just by adding a tablespoon or two of water to the bag; if your instant drink was a hot drink, you also get a bag for heating the drink. Everything is vacuum-packed in high-quality plastic, and it's lightweight and relatively small in volume. The main bag everything comes in can double as an emergency water carrier. Our military must be the best-fed in history, and as the old saying goes, an army travels on its stomach. Can you imagine how the Roman generals would have loved to have had MREs for their men?
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There are exceptions, but I usually only go to mass on Sundays or holy days of obligation. During the time since the hurricane, I went to First Friday mass and a couple of daily masses, and it was good to know that, even during a time when everything else is different from your usual life (no traffic lights, for instance) the liturgy is still there, the same.
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