I am facing the coming evenfall with a smidgen of awe and not an insignificant amount of trepidation.
I spent much of the day battening down the hatches, as it were – securing shed doors and windows, making fast the canoe, and ensuring that no loose bits of stuff in the yard might be turned into missiles if and when tonight’s storm arrives as ferociously as some suspect it may.
Last time we had a wind warning of this magnitude, we were without hydro power for four days. Luckily, we were able to press our old Y2K generator into service once again. Indeed, about the only time we haven’t fired up that generator was when the vaunted millennium bug sputtered out of existence at the stroke of the midnight that ushered in the Year 2000.
You may laugh over my folly, that I would have prepared so diligently for that non-event, but the number of times that generator has kept our frozen goods frozen for days and our toes warm through the nights over the past decade and a half offers me the last laugh.
With the outdoors in readiness for the coming storm, this task is my final act of preparation. It’s earlier than I usually set down my Odd Thoughts for the week, but if BC Hydro’s hard-working men and women are not up to the task that Mother Nature may be placing before the tonight, my usual Sunday evening reverie could result in a missed deadline. And after 39 years in the business, that would be more embarrassment than I care to take on myself.
Perhaps it’s all unnecessary – the battening-down and the uncharacteristic distance between writing and deadline.
Perhaps the storm will fizzle as it swings into the Fraser Valley. Or perhaps it will veer off its anticipated path and and give us a bye this time. Such things do happen.
You’ll know as you read this, days later, whether I am a careful and fastidious planner of my own fate – or a doddering old fool who has come to fear a stiff breeze.
Like most people, I don’t fancy feeling the fool.
Nevertheless, I do hope that today’s preparations will prove as needless tonight as that generator was on Jan. 1, 2000.
Oh dear, the lights are flickering again… gotta run, folks. I’ve got a “Send” button to push.
Before it’s too late!
