It’s Sunday evening, and the server is back up. More on that in a moment.

Upcoming Events and Such

Boskone rapidly approaches. There’s more stuff in March, but I’m not going to think about those things until after the Boston trip.

The main thing I’ll be doing at Boskone is managing two tables in the dealer’s room. The first is the Paper Angel Press table, of which Water Dragon Publishing is an imprint. The other table is the Small Publishing in a Big Universe, where we provide an opportunity for authors to sell their books when they don’t have a table of their own.

Steven Radecki won’t be able to make it to Boston, so I’m the point of contact. I’ve already heard from two of the authors. If you’re looking for books by Stephen R. Wilk or Colin Alexander, I will have their books at Boskone.

The Topic: Lost Power

The power is restored and I’m on my work laptop, in the dining room. It occurred to me that I could still get my work done tonight through my hotspot, and I was about 20 minutes into it when the lights came on behind me.

I have some herbal mint tea with honey steeping beside me. I’m using one the custom keyboards I built to type. The heater is blowing warm air down the back of my sweater. The glow of my screen is likely reflected in my glasses. I’m alive and comfortable in my home.

For a little while, we sat in the dark, listening to the wind whip through the trees. Occasionally, the metal gate along the side of the house would get picked up in the dance and clang against a fence post. Chris’s cat does not care for the stormy weather, and to be honest, I didn’t care for it much myself.

You appreciate the little things when you no longer have them. We haven’t been running the heater hard this winter, but we have been keeping the house from getting too cold. With the power out and no estimate for when it would be restored, the chill felt profound.

With the trip coming up this week, there are a number of things I need to do to prepare so that Day Job will be happy. It’s really hard to do those things without a working computer and internet. Even when I pulled the laptop from its docking station and setup on the kitchen table, I still have a screen a little larger than a postage stamp to operate on, and as a software engineer, I can tell you that isn’t a large enough workspace.

Then there’s all of the entertainment options. I rely on Spotify for music. Streaming services provide videos. I chat with my friends on Discord. I could do some of that on my phone, but with no estimate for the return of power, it did not seem wise to run the battery down.

Finally, there is this blog. I was already a couple of hours late with yesterday’s post. How would I feel if the lack of power kept me from writing this one? I could write something in Notepad or Word using one of my laptops, but the server itself runs in my garage, so it was down, too.

The power is back, and all is well. I still have a bunch to finish for work, but that can proceed, now.

Wish me luck!