Dark days

I thought an upcoming string of near 100-degree days would be awful. I just didn’t know how awful till last week’s Midwest storms put the lights out.

Within just a couple hours of my whining in last Friday’s blog about how hot it was going to be, storms rolled through the Mid Ohio Valley. Great, thinks I; that’ll cool things off for a little bit. Instead, the storms knocked out power to several million people in five or six states. I was one of them. You think I was whining on Friday, but with no power for air conditioning you should have heard me when it hit 101 degrees on Sunday.

Got power back Wednesday (although it’s gone off again several times as they make permanent repairs), so naturally I got no work at all done from last Friday till now. No computer, so no office work; no power tools, so no shop work.

Now, some of you who know that I’m not much of a hand-tool woodworker are probably about to point out the error of my ways. But you still can’t work in the dark no matter what kind of tools you use. I tried some candles and flashlights, but it just wasn’t enough light for these old eyes. And with the temperature outside the shop at 101, I wasn’t about to roll up the garage door.

Things seem pretty much back to normal here, although I’m really trying to play catch-up after nearly five unscheduled days off. The first order of business doesn’t even help address that, as much of it was repairing and cleaning up debris outside, as well as emptying refrigerator and freezer and shopping to replace everything that went bad.

It occurs to me that I need one more power tool, one that I’d never considered before: A small generator that would at least run the refrigerator and let me get some work done the next time this happens.

A.J.