Tuesday update: Better contented with Winter

All right, I’m still uneasy about weather and lack of generators, but the power is up at the time I type this, which is Monday night, actually. However, for the first time in a … very long time … decades, probably about thirty years, there aren’t any dogs in my home. I sent them off to the vet to board because it wasn’t at all clear when the power would come back on.

They were saying maybe midnight for most people, but we’re low priority (not a lot of people up here, after all). Also, on Sunday they said they should have the power on by four pm and it was actually seven hours longer. Which is actually not terrible, at least they’re working on it or expect to be soon. Today, my house was losing 2.5 degrees F per hour, so a little back-of-the-envelope calculation suggested the temp in my house could be maybe 43 F by sundown, well below freezing by midnight, and WAY below freezing before dawn. I mean, I don’t know if the rate of decrease would be constant, but it’s supposed to be really cold tonight, 10 F or less, so it seemed very possible the temp would keep dropping that fast.

Thus, I said to my neighbor, the competent guy who clears trees and plows driveways and has a big truck with four-wheel drive, “Hey, Tony, would you please take my dogs to the vet quick before they close and they can stay there overnight.” And there they went, and then the power came on after all, so here we are. Alas, the dogs are undoubtedly not very contented with their night, but on the other hand, they’re warm. And Tony can go get them for me tomorrow too, because highway B is terrible, evidently. Not just steepish, curvy, and covered with ice, but also you have to go around trees that are down on the highway. Evidently more keep falling, so that’s fun. Though now there is much less wind, so maybe that will be less of an issue tomorrow.

And now, since they have been boarded, all my dogs will have been vaccinated for bordatella and the canine flu, so I guess maybe I should enter Morgan and Joy in some rally competition in, say, March, since what the heck, they’re vaccinated, might as well take advantage of that to show them. (Spoiler: I keep not actually training them even though they would be good at it, so this isn’t that likely.) (But it would be a reasonable thing to do and they would really enjoy it, so we’ll see.) (Not Haydee; she would not enjoy that kind of thing.) (Have I ever mentioned that Ish has his Rally Excellent title, which is not that easy to earn and I’m proud of him. He is eleven this month, by the way, and no, he has never, ever been boarded, but at least he is the sort of dog who takes life as it comes.)

ANYWAY, the power has been on for a whopping four and a half hours as I type this, so if it’s still on Tuesday morning when this post goes live, that’ll be a really good sign.

Also, a neighbor told me there’s such a thing as a solar-powered charger for your cellphone and I sure wish I’d known that before, because wow, that would have made a BIG difference in how insecure I was feeling, since while the power was off, my cellphone was the sole contact I had with anybody and not only is the signal here sucky, but also I was watching the charge tick down … and down …. and down … and I’m definitely going to get a solar-powered cellphone charger immediately. Or as soon as Amazon can ship me one, anyway. This one looks pretty good. Has anybody got something like this? What do you think of it?

***

Writing update:

Last week was okay, I suppose, but I sort of puttered with this and that rather than leaping ahead with anything. The things I’ve been puttering with include “Midwinter,” still not finished, but close; and Tano’s next book, which I was rereading and then began to make some progress on … until the power went out.

So, yes, thus far this week has been absolutely pathetic. I compartmentalize well, but not perfectly, and it turns out I was much too worried about the temperature and the dogs to do anything, so Sunday and Monday were a complete loss in terms of writing. However, I did finish reading the book I’ve been beta reading, and once the power came back on, I drafted my first-impressions notes, which I will think about again as I re-read bits of the book and think about it. I also read three other books, which I expect I’ll post about later this week, at least briefly; and started a fourth, which I could not get into, and I think I know why and I might post about that too.

I generally set posts to go live around six in the morning, so I still won’t have any dogs at home when this post goes live. And I don’t feel I can say, “Hey, Tony, would you please go get my dogs at the crack of dawn, I’m sure you don’t have anything else to do in the morning.” However, by noon today, Tuesday, I sure hope my (warm!) home will once again be cluttered with spaniels!

In the meantime, the cats voted vehemently not to go to the vet for boarding and therefore they’re here, so that’s something. As a side note, I really do not know how I’m going to get Maximilian to the vet for vaccinations next year, because wow, vehement is a weak term for his opinion on the matter. I sure am glad the power came back on, because I was trying to decide what else to do to protect them from the cold.

Maybe I had better get some other kind of carrier that is somewhat easier to force a cat into. I’ve never actually had a cat I couldn’t get into a carrier. Not sure what options exist. Hmm. If you type “easy load cat carrier” at Amazon, you get things like this. This top-loading design would probably be easier. I suppose I should read reviews.

Today, provided the power stays on, I’m going to pick something and make real progress on it. That’s the plan!

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