There’s a nasty storm blowing through the Bay Area today. At first the reports had it that the worst impact would be up by Napa, where flooding is always a problem with heavy rains. But no, instead we got nailed with a bunch of power outages, including one Chez Lux.
As I was driving back home from work I saw some flashes of lightning and hear reports of a few small outages, but didn’t think much of it until I pulled off Highway 92 onto El Camino Real and BLAM! out went the power. I was passing by a Safeway at the time — one moment it was all lit up, the next moment nothing but a few emergency lights. A bit shocking, but also kind of neat to watch. You don’t get a front-row seat to the show like that very often. It seemed to be a fairly localized outage, because everything was still lit up as I pulled up to my intersection, but as I was waiting to make the left turn onto my street, POOF! More blackness. Not quite so cool; we have plenty of candles & energy bars in the emergency kit (plus a propane grill), but I really wasn’t in the mood for trying to make a hot meal under the circumstances.
Instead, I drove a few more blocks until I found a parking space, called Scott, and found an open restaurant for a bite of dinner. The lights were still out when I got home, so I changed into jeans, grabbed a flashlight and my laptop, and moseyed over to Starbucks for some coffee, electricity, and Internet access.
It’s not quite the evening I thought I was going to have, but it could have been a lot worse.