In 2008, Hurricane Ike arrived in our neighborhood and did some damage. Trees fell on neighbors’ houses, we lost a few shingles from our roof, but there was nothing like the damage that occurred elsewhere, or like what we’ve seen in Lake Charles and Cameron, Louisiana from Laura. Twenty-four hours after Ike passed through, we lost power, including phone service, and that went on for four or five days.
Laura looked like she might be aiming right at us for a while, but she turned away. It was amazing to look at the radar and see this massive storm sitting right beside us, but just out of reach. We had a brief rain squall on Wednesday afternoon, but after that…nothing. No wind, no rain, nothing. Honestly, we could have used the two or three inches of rain they’d been promising/threatening us with.
Then, yesterday, shortly after noon, the power went out. I scrambled to get an email out to our company’s social media manager and post something on the corporate website, but then cell phone internet service degraded and vanished. I could make phone calls, but I couldn’t even send text messages.
Uh oh, we thought. We’re on the same grid through the same power company as western Louisiana, so we feared we were going to have the same aftermath as with Ike. This time, we had a freezer full of food to worry about losing–last time, we just kept raiding the fridge until we ate everything perishable! So, we rolled our gas grill out of the garage where we’d stored it in advance of the storm and put it on our front porch. We made a quick, strategic dive into the freezer to find a couple of steaks. And did what we always do: made the best of it!
Fortunately the power came back on after five hours. Stuck around for an hour, then went out for another hour. We have a hand-crank radio/flashlight that was sent to me as part of a promo kit for the TV series The Colony back in 2010, so we were able to listen to the radio and I got a good workout turning the crank every five minutes or so to power it up! There were rumors we might see the same power fluctuations today as Entergy worked to shore up and protect the grid from total collapse, but that turned out not to be the case, and things have returned to normal.
Last weekend, I ventured out to my office building for the first time in five months. I went at a time when I was fairly confident no one else would be there, and that proved to be the case. My main goal was to retrieve my “kangaroo“–my adjustable-height desk adapter that lets me stand while I work at the computer. I have one for my writing/home computer, but I’d been sitting a lot at my laptop computer for the day job at my ad hoc work station (positioned at a 90° angle to my writing computer) and I was starting to feel the strain on my back. So now I have two kangaroos in my office, and my back is much happier.
I also retrieved several bags of food from my office–my lunch and snack supplies–that I had abandoned on my last day working there. I’d forgotten how much stuff I’d left behind: soups, crackers, fruit cups, snack bars, etc. It was like going on a shopping trip! (Except everything is at least five months old–I’m not going to look at any expiration dates.)
Still working on the same tank of gas as I had when I came home from the office that day in mid-March. The poor car has only been out six or seven times on short runs since then so, naturally, the battery died. I left it like that for a few days until I remembered I needed to be able to move the car to get at the lawn mower. I contemplated calling AAA, but instead I spent less than $20 on a trickle charger. I let if run for five or six days, but the first time I tried to start the car, it worked. Now I leave the battery plugged in to the trickle charger full time. Best $20 I spent in a while.
What have we been watching lately? I saw season 3 of The Sinner (USA) and S3 of Absentia on Amazon. Both ok, but not terrific. I zipped through the The Woods, a Polish series based on Harlan Coben’s novel, which was pretty good. I’ve been revisiting my youth watching Columbo episodes from time to time. I’ve finished the first three seasons already. Another season 3 was the final season of the Danish series The Rain (Netflix)–only six episodes, but they packed a lot into them. I loved Perry Mason (HBO)–great cast, great look, and an interesting “reboot” of a beloved character.
I’m following along with Lovecraft Country (HBO) as it rolls out. I have no idea what to expect, but I’ve been enjoying it so far. My wife and I have only two episodes left of S4 of The Good Fight before we’ll have to start looking for something else to watch. My current early morning watch while I hit the elliptical is season 1 of the Spanish series Money Heist (Netflix). I always feel like my linguistic skills should be much better than they are after immersing myself in a foreign TV series for days and weeks on end. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to work that way.
Brian Keene and I signed a contract with Cemetery Dance to publish our collaboration Dissonant Harmonies. Some formats of that book stand a decent chance of appearing in 2020. Stay tuned!
Other forthcoming publications:
- The Hound of Bracketville, Places We Fear to Tread, September 2020
- Halloween Funeral, Something Good to Eat, September 28, 2020
- The Fugitive with the Dragon Tattoo, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, 2020
- Bloody Sunday, The Book of Extraordinary Sherlock Holmes Stories, Mango, November 2020
- Reflections of the Past, Mickey Finn, December 14, 2020
It’s a little hard to tally up my total fiction publications, including reprints and translations and audio versions, etc. but the number now seems to be somewhere in excess of 150 publications of nearly 100 different short stories. That’s a lotta words!
