Blogging in the Dark

"At least four are dead and two million are without power Saturday, all as the Washington D.C. area contends with a record-breaking heat wave."

"Winds reached 80 miles per hour, and it's estimated that a full restoration of power could take up to five days."

"Temperatures hit 104 degrees in Washington D.C, breaking records on Friday. The forecast for the city shows temperatures continuing to reach the triple digits. There's also a possibility of even more thunderstorms for the region."

 - Slate.com

Yes, I am missing those cold Russian days right now. Last night one of the worst storms I've ever seen blew threw and knocked out our power. I had heard that it was supposed to rain last night but I didn't realize it was supposed to be that severe. It came on fast, too. I started hearing some distant thunder which quickly turned into gusting winds. I knew it was worse than usual when I heard a loud, harsh crash outside. The wind was blowing the metal chairs, tables, and umbrellas against the metal gate in our apartment complex's courtyard. Soon after our power went out. 

All of my prior experiences with power outages have been brief. A storm hits, power goes out, it comes back on within a few hours (if that). Well, as of right now, our power has been out for about 24 hours. If the news stories are to be believed, it's going to be a little while before we get it back. Since I've never dealt with this bad of an outage before, it didn't occur to me to go into survivalist mode and store my refrigerated goods in coolers of ice. That is, not until this morning when I wandered over to the store to get some breakfast and saw people purchasing bags and bags of ice. By the time we went back to the store this evening, the ice bags were long gone. 

I got some fruit and pastries to tide me over a little while. It looks like I'll be eating out for the next few days though. When you can't refrigerate, freeze, microwave, cook, or bake, you realize quickly how few nonperishable foods you have. You realize even quicker how those nonperishable foods are absolutely not going to constitute a full meal. I'm pretty ticked about that right now, since I was preparing to make a new salad dish over the weekend. I didn't have much in the fridge or freezer, but I did have fresh crab meat and a half carton of eggs that I had planned on using. I dread the thought of having to throw out a ton of previously perfectly fine food. 

Overnight, power returned to a few select places in our apartment. The building's generators keep the hallway lights on as well as a few outlets working in apartment's master bedrooms. So my roommate's outlets are working and one kitchen outlet is working. We managed to plug our Wireless modem into a working outlet so we have Internet, which is keeping me from going crazy. I think the generators are keeping air circulating in the building and my roommate has a fan plugged in in her room, which is keeping our apartment from being a total oven right now, but it's still stuffy as hell. The worst part of all of this is that we don't get hot water and only a small dribble of cold water. We're going to have to form a plan on where to go to take showers because it's basically impossible here.

Well, all in all it's been a pretty bad weekend. My plans of experimental cooking and filling out job applications today was destroyed. Most of my food supply has been rendered useless. But I won't let that get my spirits down, because next week WILL be better! On Tuesday, all of us Marshals interns have a field trip to the Drug Enforcement Administration's training academy at Quantico (same place as the FBI academy). I don't have concrete plans for Wednesday yet, but it's the 4th of July and I'm in DC - I'll find something awesome to do! Even if it's just sitting next to a monument and being proud to be an American having the time of my young life (cue cheesy, inspirational music). "I believe I can fly"? "Don't stop me now?" "The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades"...? Yes, things are going great, and they're only getting better. (Or at least they would, if the darn power would come back on!)