The power went off at 8:45 last night. No big deal—I was about to turn in for the night anyway. We went out into the street to make sure it wasn’t just us. Met a couple of neighbors that we’ve seen but never spoken to before. Pulled up the power company’s page on my phone and saw that they already had us down for the outage. 126 people affected. Just our street, then.
They said the power would be back by 11:30 and it came on at 11:10. The house got a little warm because it’s 85° outside, even at night. The biggest discomfort, though, was from the UPS that keeps our VOIP phone going. It beeped every five seconds and, later, every 10 as the battery wore down. It was like having a piece of heavy equipment backing up in our yard for a couple of hours. A while after the power came back on, it went out again. More backing up. Not quite sure when the power came on again, but it eventually did.
I started working on a new short story, my first in a while. I’ve been cogitating over it for a few weeks and then, yesterday morning, while I was doing my 30 minutes on the elliptical, I worked out the beginning, the setting and the two main characters. When I was finished, I picked up a notepad, intending to jot notes, and I covered two full sheets of paper, some of it prose and some of it snippets that wandered through my head while I was listening to Billy Joel. I was going to start writing this morning, but the power outages and the beeping inspired me to sleep later. Tomorrow, though. I’ve done some research in the interim that fills in some details nicely.
I wasn’t blown away by The Killing this season. It had some good moments, but the last hour was meh. The identity of the killer falls into one of two tropes that I tweeted recently have been done sufficiently on crime dramas. (The other was a killing that takes place on the courthouse steps before or after a trial.) The season ended in a way that echoes the way the third season of the Danish original finished (though all the other details of the season were different), but the Danish did it in a way that made it unlikely Sarah Lund will be back for a fourth.
BBC America is streaming the first episode of Broadchurch on YouTube. This looks like it could be quite good. It stars David Tennant as a Detective Inspector who moves to the small town on the Dorset coast that gives rise to the title. He has some sort of hazy past (he was cleared of something pertaining to an infamous case). He’s also taken over a job that a DS was expecting to get. On his first day on the job, the body of a young boy is found on the beach, and it’s murder. Arthur Darvill (Rory from Doctor Who) plays the town vicar. I thought it would be something of a reunion, but then I recalled that Tennant left before Rory entered Doctor Who. So, the Doctor has met Rory, but Tennant didn’t act with Darvill. Everyone in town knows everyone else, a notion well established by a long tracking shot that follows the father through the streets on his way to work, greeting everyone he meets. Some gut-wrenching emotional scenes, and the cinematography is gorgeous.
