Author: David

Shelter-in-Place Journal, Day 155

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:

followed by this one:

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.

Shelter-in-Place Journal, Day 154

We followed our usual Monday morning routine today – go to the JCC for personal training outside, then go to Trader Joe’s to pick up a few things. Monday morning seems to be the best time to go to Trader Joe’s – we arrive around 9:15, during “Senior Hour,” when the store is uncrowded (today, we didn’t have to wait at all to get in or to pay) and well-stocked, and we can get in and out quickly.

PG&E was warning everyone that they might have to institute rolling blackouts again today – I got a call, two emails, and two texts before lunch. They suggested pre-cooling the house to 72 and then turning the A/C up to 78 at 2pm when the peak load period was expected to begin (I wonder if the pandemic has changed the timing of peak load) – so we did. The house stayed fairly cool during the afternoon; when we got home from our post-dinner walk, we decided to open up and use the fan in hopes that it’ll get a bit cooler overnight.

Dinner was another experiment – Miso-Glazed Fish from the New York Times. We’d bought a tub of miso paste early in the lockdown; I’m not sure what I had in mind when I bought it, but this was a good way to use some of it. The recipe was easy to put together, but the actual cooking was slightly more exciting than I wanted – I used our small broiler/convection oven, and with the shelf in “broil” position, we started seeing small explosions. So I moved the shelf down and then had to bake the fish for a few minutes to finish cooking it. Next time, I’ll use the “real” oven – but it was too hot for that tonight.

Stay cool!