Arawak City -- off the grid

Well it's been a while since I've posted a lot and now seems like an appropriate moment.

After reading the book "Better Off" by Eric Brindle about living without power and in a Mennonite community for 18 months and his adaptions and preference of it, and all of the talk of collapse and living off the grid, many of us in Central Ohio are experiencing it for real right now as the strongest winds to hit this city in our recorded history devastated the power grid, bringing the institutional education system to a halt shortly after it resumed from Summer break and providing the youth with a TV/Video game free chance to roam the streets playing outside with each other. It has also meant everyone is losing massive amounts of food they had stored in their freezers and barbecues having being going on almost non-stop.

The weird thing is it's not universal by any means, if it was things would be a lot more chaotic, but a lot of people just don't have power, whereas the downtown library is full up and running, so I'm able to surf the web from inside of here.

At home the solar panel and battery are proving useful but limited in terms of their ability to run the house, since my neighbors don't have electricity I don't have wifi to surf the web, thus rendering my computers off the grid, and giving me the solace of breaking my internet addiction and pushing me into a introspective zone of reading books off of my library.

Now the disruption has been interesting and eerie and it still isn't over, as block by block very slowly the power gets restored, it's unlikely we will get it until the end of the week, but nobody really knows. That and the roof was partially damaged leaving us feeling more exposed and that is the one area of home improvement I'm kind of hesitant to embark upon DiY, because gravity can really be more dangerous than about any other force.

Another thing that has happened is Etea & I analyzed our schedule and decided it made sense to start waking up at 5am or so in the morning to start our day vs. loafing about in the evening. I started this today without really trying as I had a dream that I just happened to wake up from at 5:15 am. The dream involved me filming a movie with my digital camera, an eviction the GT&T or whatever the psuedo-telco investigating the live animals and human bodies in the abandoned factory that was an amalgamation of Milo, BLD & CAP. There were live goats roaming around, underground bunkers with libraries and weird pornographic videos of former lovers showing up on my camera without getting into the specifics. It was an interesting dream.

And that it was I have to say for now.