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A weird evening; a birth day
Mar. 25th, 2009 12:08 amIt is just past midnight, and my birthday is now over.
The evening was quite peculiar, surely the oddest birthday I've had. At about 8.30, Kimberly & I were sitting with Michael A. and Katherine and Chevy's, and the lights suddenly flickered, then went out entirely. Everyone started cheering.
Apparently I haven't been out in the dark much with other people since the advent of backlit cell phones, as I was quite struck and humored by the many people that started wandering with cell phones out as lights. Katherine and Michael each quickly pulled their cells out as well; Katherine twittered.
We stuck around for a bit, finally grabbed a menu, made our best guess at the bill, tax, and tip, handed payment to our waitress (just as she came by to tell us that no doubt PG&E would be fixing things within minutes, ha!), and headed out.
I suspect many people took the blackout as opportunity for free dinner and/or drinks.
Surely that helps stimulate the economy, as now they have money to spend on dinner and/or drinks tomorrow, yes?
Driving home we saw pretty random lights on and off. Three stoplights on Ashby and some other nearby buildings were out, but lots more was on. Driving through the brightly lit neighborhoods around our house, we turned the corner to our house and found it ... pitch black.
(A surprise, since I usually think of our house as pretty blackout-resistant, since it's on the same grid as a fire station.)
So afterward Kimberly and I headed to Moe's (where I found the first of the Dark Tower comics, which ate the last of my credit slip there) and then we went to a nearby cafe where we read and snacked for an hour.
After arriving back home around 11.15, Kimberly went to bed, while I sat up, typing emails on my iPhone.
Kinda cramps the hand if you try and type something long.
The power finally came back on just before midnight.
And 3.5 hours for a power outage in a major urban area with no apparent major causes? Pretty unacceptable.
Despite annoyance, still a relaxed (and sometimes humorous) end to the day.
Other highlights included a bike ride down to Jack London Square then over to Emeryville (with stops by Endgame, Barnes & Noble, and Borders) on the way, and a game of Lost Cities: The Board Game (purchased at the aforementioned Endgame stop, with money happily received from my mom when she visited on Sunday).
Tomorrow it's back to work, but I'm getting into some projects that have me pretty jazzed, so there's no unhappiness there. It's taken all my energy not to work on them over this weekend (and I actually did do some programming for them Friday night).
The evening was quite peculiar, surely the oddest birthday I've had. At about 8.30, Kimberly & I were sitting with Michael A. and Katherine and Chevy's, and the lights suddenly flickered, then went out entirely. Everyone started cheering.
Apparently I haven't been out in the dark much with other people since the advent of backlit cell phones, as I was quite struck and humored by the many people that started wandering with cell phones out as lights. Katherine and Michael each quickly pulled their cells out as well; Katherine twittered.
We stuck around for a bit, finally grabbed a menu, made our best guess at the bill, tax, and tip, handed payment to our waitress (just as she came by to tell us that no doubt PG&E would be fixing things within minutes, ha!), and headed out.
I suspect many people took the blackout as opportunity for free dinner and/or drinks.
Surely that helps stimulate the economy, as now they have money to spend on dinner and/or drinks tomorrow, yes?
Driving home we saw pretty random lights on and off. Three stoplights on Ashby and some other nearby buildings were out, but lots more was on. Driving through the brightly lit neighborhoods around our house, we turned the corner to our house and found it ... pitch black.
(A surprise, since I usually think of our house as pretty blackout-resistant, since it's on the same grid as a fire station.)
So afterward Kimberly and I headed to Moe's (where I found the first of the Dark Tower comics, which ate the last of my credit slip there) and then we went to a nearby cafe where we read and snacked for an hour.
After arriving back home around 11.15, Kimberly went to bed, while I sat up, typing emails on my iPhone.
Kinda cramps the hand if you try and type something long.
The power finally came back on just before midnight.
And 3.5 hours for a power outage in a major urban area with no apparent major causes? Pretty unacceptable.
Despite annoyance, still a relaxed (and sometimes humorous) end to the day.
Other highlights included a bike ride down to Jack London Square then over to Emeryville (with stops by Endgame, Barnes & Noble, and Borders) on the way, and a game of Lost Cities: The Board Game (purchased at the aforementioned Endgame stop, with money happily received from my mom when she visited on Sunday).
Tomorrow it's back to work, but I'm getting into some projects that have me pretty jazzed, so there's no unhappiness there. It's taken all my energy not to work on them over this weekend (and I actually did do some programming for them Friday night).