It’s ironic. We’ve always had frequent power outages at our house — sometimes, it’s because the weather is too dry, sometimes because it’s wet, and sometimes because a car crashed into a pole a few blocks away.

But now that California is suffering through rotating power outages due to the amazingly screwed-up deregulation of the electric industry (and a lot of greed), I’ve discovered that we picked a very good location after all.

The PG&E service area is divided into 14 “outage blocks”. To find out what outage block you’re in, you look at your PG&E bill. When they need to shed load from the grid, each block is taken offline for an hour or so, to spread the misery.
But, for obvious reasons, they don’t want to turn off power to fire, police, or hospitals. And so, if you happen to share a circuit with a priority customer, you may not be in any outage block — and that appears to be the case for us, since there’s no indication of an outage block on our bill.

That doesn’t, of course, excuse us from saving energy — if the system is strained enough, unscheduled outages will follow, and that would be bad news. But it does mean I don’t have to worry about having the alarm not ring tomorrow morning.

I even did my part to help save energy at work today; not only did I turn off my computer when I left for the day, but I also defrosted my refrigerator (as a byproduct of turning it off — I decided that I didn’t need to run it to keep three bottles of water cold, at least not this week).

This afternoon, while Jeffrey was at a birthday party, Diane and I walked down the street to see some new homes near us. They’re two-story houses, with OK kitchens and 9-foot ceilings. The smallest house is 1471 square feet and goes for a bit over $500,000; the next is 1700 square feet and goes for about $640,000; and the biggest model is 2005 square feet and goes for $740,000. All of the houses are on the same-sized lot — 3000 square feet (which is about the footprint of my brother’s house!), and there might be a good four feet between the houses.

They put the houses on the market last week, and they’ve already sold five of fifteen (and not all are available yet). I think this is just insane…oh, by the way, the houses are on a busy corner, with a bus stop right below one house’s bedroom window. I am very glad I’m not trying to get into this housing market; I don’t know how people can afford to move into the area.

It’s an ill market collapse that blows no good

In case you don’t know, eToys is having a big clearance sale (I’m afraid it’s in preparation for going out of business). We took advantage of it to buy toys for just about all of the birthday parties Jeffrey will be attending for the rest of this year — stuff from “Uniquely eToys” is especially well priced. Get yours while you can!

Perfect!

I, too, took the quiz (link via Backup Brain via Susan), and I got all 20 right. Not only am I over 40, but I retain useless information beyond all belief!

I’m at my group’s twice-yearly planning meeting, held at my boss’s summer cottage on Lake Wallenpaupack, in the Poconos. It’s a lovely area, but broadband is not available yet, so at every break, the dozen or so of us compete frantically for the two available phone lines so we can connect up to the network. And half the time, someone plugs into a line in use, blowing the session away.

This year, though, life is better. We’re still restricted to a phone line, but we’ve got a wireless LAN set up and are sharing a single dialup line seamlessly. It’s still slow, but it’s much better than any previous meeting. The real test will come tomorrow, when we should be paying attention to each other instead of our computers!

The other problem, of course, is that this is a summer resort area; facilities are a bit light during the winter (the hotel doesn’t serve breakfast during the winter, for example). And the roads in the development don’t get paved…and my winter driving skills are limited, to say the least. So far, so good, though — there’s no fresh snow arriving, and what’s on the ground is well packed.

Well, I made it through a full week of the new millennium without getting on an airplane, but my streak ended today, and this very brief entry comes to you from the Newark Airport Hilton in Elizabeth, New Jersey. I was lucky and got here early enough to be able to use the exercise room before they closed it at 10 (to be fair, it’s a staffed fitness center and pool, so it would cost them money to keep it open longer), so I’m reasonably happy (I seem to be getting hooked on endorphins again, and I am not looking forward to the next few days, where I won’t have access to any exercise equipment — and I don’t have clothing suitable for running in the cold weather here).

I’ll be in the Poconos the rest of the week; it’ll be a winter wonderland, I’m sure. But I didn’t bring my camera, so you’ll have to take my word for it — as it is, I’ve already seen plenty of snow here, but at least it was neatly piled up instead of coming out of the sky.

(Link via The Rapidly Changing Face of Computing.)