As I write this entry, it’s been 24 full hours since our last power outage. I never found out what caused the one last night (the weather was not an issue), but at least it was brief enough that the UPSes carried through with only a small hitch – the Mac mini that runs the home automation put itself in sleep mode, even though it’s on a UPS. I fixed it this morning when I saw the power light pulsing on and off (the lights in the garden were on, too, which was another clue that things had gone awry).

Speaking of the garden, we harvested our first persimmon today. Not just the first persimmon of the year, but the first persimmon since we planted the tree in early 2014! We should get a few more persimmons this year unless the squirrels beat us to them – we don’t want to harvest too soon because it’s hard to keep the persimmons from getting soft.

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!

We had just started watching last night’s SNL when the power went out. Not surprising given the weather, but still annoying.

Our UPS made it through an hour, and then it gave up, but all was well because we had phones with 5G service, so we ordered dinner from Negeen Persian Restaurant through DoorDash. It was delicious, as always, but as I started to post the photo of our mandatory candlelight dinner, we lost cell service – I guess the tower’s battery gave up.

I took the phone out of automatic carrier selection and it found a T-Mobile signal – who knows how long it’ll stay up?

Not long enough – it failed before I could post this. So we got in the car and drove over to Shir Hadash, which has power, to camp on their network.

It’s like living in pioneer days!

This year, Shir Hadash’s Torah Study is looking at each week’s portion through the lens of Mussar (think of Benjamin Franklin’s plan for self-improvement, but with Hebrew added), using the Mussar Torah Commentary (affiliate link) as a jumping-off point.

This week’s portion is Vayera (Genesis 18:1-22:24); the Mussar attribute that goes with this portion is z’rizut – alacrity. Our lay leader, David Bamberger, led a lively discussion about the portion and how Abraham demonstrated (and didn’t demonstrate) alacrity. I enjoyed it, though I was a little distracted by serving as the Zoom master.

After Torah study and services, we headed to Tony and Alba’s Pizza. There’s a Best Buy across the street; we wanted to see whether they had refrigerators that would fit our space. And, since we were still waiting for University Electric to tell us about availability of the cooktop we wanted, we didn’t ignore the salesperson who asked if she could help us. It turned out that she could help us more than we expected – twenty minutes later, we’d placed an order for the cooktop, with delivery scheduled for the Monday before Thanksgiving. Alacrity indeed!

We took one small step on our journey towards an induction cooktop today – we bought an induction-compatible 8” skillet while we were at Target. Next step – ordering the cooktop!

Shabbat Shalom!