Pandemic Journal, Day 588

It was a dark and stormy night. We went to bed early to conserve our battery-powered lights and fell into fitful sleep.

We were awakened at 2:17am. The bedroom Amazon Echo greeted the return of power by spinning teal and blue lights around its ring so we’d know it had returned to the land of the living – I jumped out of bed and unplugged it before going through the rest of the house to turn off lights and the TV, and then we went back to sleep.

For twenty minutes – then we started hearing voices coming from the family room. It sounded like characters talking in a movie – and it was. I’d turned off the TV, but not the TiVo or the sound system; the TiVo will only stay on its menu screen for 20 minutes before switching to live TV, and that’s what woke us the second time.

Back to bed for more intermittent sleep, and then up to go to the gym. It was still raining a bit, and it seemed awfully dark, but driving there was easy, and it wasn’t too crowded.

The rains had stopped by the time we got back from the gym, so we went out for a walk to see what the storm had wrought. There were downed tree limbs in several places; we talked to someone who’d lost a big tree in her front yard. And as we neared home, we saw a rainbow over the elementary school.

We haven’t tried to watch Saturday’s SNL again so far. No sense in tempting fate!

Edited to add: the power went out about three minutes after I posted this. PG&E claims it’s the same outage as last night!