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!