When we got up this morning, it was cool enough to open the windows, but one look outside convinced us otherwise. The AQI was about 150 and got worse throughout the day, though there was a little blue sky around sunset, enough to let us take a short walk.

To add insult to injury, Facebook showed me photos from five years ago today, when we were in Spokane for Sasquan. There were huge fires nearby and the scene looked very much like what we saw today; as that week wore on, the AQI got worse and worse, peaking well over 500 (“hazardous”).

We have friends who have had to evacuate because of the fire. We are in what should be a safe area, but we’ve packed a go-bag anyway (urged on by our friends the Skeletonis and CalOES)!

The Post Office claims to have delivered my new Raspberry Pis to a PO Box; unfortunately, I don’t have a PO Box. I am, however, PO’ed. I’ll see if they materialize tomorrow before trying to figure out how to get a reshipment or refund or something.

I’m a speaker at my Toastmasters meeting on Thursday. I had planned to give a technical talk about the new meeting template I’m building on Google Sheets, but it’s not finished (and, if I’m honest, probably won’t be finished until the next time I’m scheduled to be Toastmaster), so I had to figure out another topic and another project for my speech – and do it before I had a chat with my evaluator this afternoon.

So just before the call, I was busy looking at Twitter instead. And I saw a tweet from the Mercury News:

The California ISO, which runs the state power grid, declared a Stage 2 emergency around 2:40 p.m., saying that power outages were "likely" unless residents and companies immediately begin conserving electricity. #rollingblackouts #poweroutage https://t.co/Hz757GWrXb

— Mercury News (@mercnews) August 18, 2020

followed by this one:

Here's how to check if your home will lose power during the California PG&E blackouts. #rollingblackouts #PowerOutages https://t.co/UqIZihBSjs

— Mercury News (@mercnews) August 18, 2020

And when I followed the links, I discovered that we were in outage block 2K and were scheduled to lose power at 6pm – right in the middle of our weekly trivia team Zoom call!

My first step was to warn the team that we might suddenly vanish from the call. My second step was to tell Diane what was happening, since we’d planned to cook dinner after the call and that didn’t seem like a good plan any more. So we took out some frozen brisket and thawed it and she made a salad to go with it. And I turned the A/C to a higher temperature to do my part for conservation.

It worked! I suspect we weren’t alone in conserving energy, because the demand curve dropped below the predictions very quickly and our power didn’t go out at 6…and it’s still on now.

I hope they treat outages like jury duty so that being put on notice is enough to put you at the end of the line. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow – it’s still expected to be hot.

I still have to work on my speech, too. Tomorrow.