powerless

Round about nine o'clock yesterday evening, there was a large shudder (refridgerator, etc), and everything went very, very black.   That is, there were some lights still in the parts of Eldorado that are beyond the railway line, and a long, long line of stationary traffic in the distance on I-25 - the kind of line of pin pricks of light that one only notices when cars and trucks are backed up because of some kind of problem on La Bajada, the steep slope going down towards Cochiti and ultimately Albuquerque.   Here, however, everything was dark and silent (apart from us rummaging around looking for flashlights - we knew where the candles were - and the grinding wheels of my brain anxious about the underfloor heating shutting down, the pipes freezing, should I turn on the hot water tap?, etc.).   So, obviously, no posting here last night.   Everything sprang back into luminosity around 12.15 a.m., after giving us three hours of pioneer life in rural Northern New Mexico.   Except Back Then, I'm sure we would have had a fire lit, and warmed bricks or baked potatoes (no, not the designer fingerling kind from Whole Foods) and wrapped them in flannel and taken them off to bed.   I'll be happy if this doesn't happen tonight, when it's scheduled to go down to -1 ...