never could get the hang of Thursdays…

Yesterday was almost a total loss–I shouldn’t have bothered to get out of bed!

I almost mean that literally, because physically, I completely crashed yesterday afternoon and I have no idea why. I didn’t get up until 12:30 p.m., ate a little food, and just felt awful: exhausted, slightly queasy, sinus headache, heavy eyes, dizzy and light headed. I didn’t even want to sit up at the computer. After a short time I went and lay down on the couch, and I fell asleep. If you don’t know me really well, you can’t appreciate how weird this is. I have chronic insomnia, partly because I’m naturally nocturnal and can’t sleep well at night. My body wants to sleep during the day, but since I’m also hyper-alert, I rarely can relax enough to take a nap. I just never, ever take a nap, no matter how crappy I feel. But I dozed all afternoon yesterday–enough to have lots of dreams–and I don’t know WTF was going on. Maybe I was fighting off a virus, or my body is reacting to the recent changes in my sleep schedule and workouts, or I was reacting to the weather, or I should get a carbon monoxide detector! 🙁 But I was a vegetable until…

…precisely two minutes before I should have started my fifteen-minute sunset attunement, when my eyes snapped open, I got up, checked the time, set the timer, and did sunset attunement. After that I felt better and settled back at the computer to work. Can we get more cliché vampy than that?? I’m embarrassed, sheesh.

It had been raining all day, but now, in came the raging storm for real. Pepperell didn’t get any snow, but the wind was most impressive and the rain was beating against the house and windows like a scene in a Brontë novel. I haven’t seen the barometer drop so low so fast for quite a while! I got some work done, but just around midnight, the power went out. Since I now have a desktop instead of laptops, there went the computer, poof. I’d been saving all my work, but not to anything I could access with one of the laptops, like a flash drive. *sigh*

Of course, all the flashlights–and there were three I could put my hands on immediately–decided that their batteries were on life support. I lit a couple of candles, found the old analog phone, plugged it in and called in the outage to the power company. It took some fuss and bother to get out the Coleman lantern and fuel because a lot of stuff got piled into the closet on top of them since the ice storm in 2008. But I got them out and fired up the old one. Since the circumstances suggested we wouldn’t be getting power restored any time soon, I unpacked the brand new Coleman lantern I bought after the ice storm, assembled it and prepped the mantels, and got it blazing away, too. Now I had plenty of light! And I had two laptops with about nine hours of battery life between them–but no Internet access.

I did my entire 85-minute workout to a partial audiobook and music mp3s on Pigwidgeon, using my cell phone’s countdown timer to time the warm-up. So I didn’t miss my workout, but after that I was kind of at a loss. The work I’d been doing required Internet access. I called the power company’s outage line again at 3:30 a.m. and they had a recording that said they expected power to be restored by 4:00 a.m. In the past, those predictions have been very accurate, but not last night. I took a lantern to read by and went to bed close to 5:00 a.m. and the power still was off. I think it came back on around 5:30 or 6:00 a.m. The house never felt very cold, I was rather surprised. The Coleman lanterns throw off a lot of heat, though.

So much for Thursday, what a washout, in every sense! Next post: update on the #ISPfail saga.