FYI: My power is out. Again. Estimated time of restoration is 3 hours. No one can blame a tornado today. Apparently, the power can't even stay on through some light rain anymore.

UPDATE: It's back on! And in just a shade under two hours. They're getting faster.

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FYI: My power is out. Again.

There was thunder and lightning for six continuous hours overnight Sunday and several more hours of lightning last night. I expected power outages from those, but no. Today's multi-hour outage comes in the middle of the afternoon on a comparatively calmer rainstorm, electrically speaking. That's what I get for letting my guard down.

I live in a metro Atlanta county, and the power to my neighborhood keeps going out, multiple times a year. And it feels like the outages are getting longer. This one started at about 4PM. Initial estimate was that it would be restored by 6. Update just came in that revised the target to 7:30.* That's not surprising; a few weeks ago, the original four hour estimated job ended up taking thirteen.

For the last few months, all we've heard from local government and Georgia Power is how eager they are to invite new development, especially power-hungry data centers. Why in the world should I be supportive of that when they can't even keep the lights on in well-established neighborhoods?

So what do I do now? I was planning on going to the grocery store, but there doesn't seem much point in buying ice cream sandwiches just to bring them home to melt. I guess I'll do what I always do in these increasingly common situations: I'll wait for the power to come back on. And then I'll hustle to get what I need done before it goes out again.

*At 7:45, I got word that the newly estimated time of recovery was now 10:45PM. So I have started the gasoline generator for the refrigerator and made myself a hamburger on the propane grill. I'm getting quite good at camping at home.

At 8:23PM, the power came back on. The first thing my phone tells me after the router comes back online is that another round of thundershowers is due about midnight. I think I'll leave gas in the generator; that's the best way to be sure I won't need it.

Update 05/28: Per WSB TV, "The NWS confirmed an EF-1 tornado touched down in Coweta County on Tuesday afternoon." I had no idea, but as it happens, the start of that tornado track is very close to where the Georgia Power trucks spent several hours working to restore power yesterday evening. So i guess I should go easier on them; a surprise tornado is definitely harder to defend against than a thunderstorm. (That's the second tornado to hit my neighborhood since 2020. Maybe it's time to consider moving somewhere safer, like the side of a dormant volcano.)

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On April 1, the high was 77°. On April 2 and 3, the high was 84°. On April 4 and 5, the high was 85°. (Atlanta broke a 54-year record high.) They say it'll be cooler next week, but I decided I'd seen enough of my poodles lying around panting, so they got their first clipper cut of the earlier-than-expected summer season yesterday.

I love cutting on my living topiaries. It's very relaxing for me, and the boys don't complain too much. Louis mostly likes the attention, but Henry will make himself scarce if he sees me moving towards the scissors storage, so I have to be sneaky!

I always leave the whiskers a little longer around Henry's muzzle, but as you can see, I generally trim Louis completely. I think this is the last time I'll be doing that. Sure, he's cute with short hair, but when fuzzy, he looks a more like a teddy bear, which really suits his personality better.

Meanwhile, Henry's just ready for a break in the pollen and heat.

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No matter what the calendar says, spring is here. You can tell by all the thunderstorm warnings and tornado watches.

According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tornado database, the city of Newnan, Georgia, has been hit by five tornadoes since 1974. An average of once a decade doesn't seem so bad, but three of those have hit since 2020. One of those brushed the entrance to my neighborhood. Another leveled the local high school.

Also according to NOAA, "Severe Storms" have accounted for over 50% of all the disasters to strike Georgia since 1980. (That category doesn't include "Tropical Cyclones" or "Flooding," which combine for an additional 23%.) Here in the Bible Belt, we like to thank Jesus when a tornado takes out our house but leaves us alive. Given how frequently the weather strikes these days, I guess that means Jesus loves us more than he used to.

I am not a climatologist, but given that tornadoes are driven by heat thermal energy in the atmosphere, it's probably no coincidence that the ten warmest years in recorded history are also the past ten years. This bodes poorly for the near future, especially in the current political environment where combatting climate change is taking a back seat to, well, everything else. (Which is why the current administration has proposed cutting the NOAA staff in half. Tornadoes might be more common than ever, but at least they're getting harder to track!)

I have started paying attention when the forecast calls for severe weather. Not that I can do a lot about it, other than make sure that I'm in the basement. Since I live in a basement, that's not too hard. But, as a famous slaveholder once said, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

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Henry and Louis' first snow day.

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I threw a ball into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
Or, more perhaps it flew such height,
That trees would dare constrain its flight.

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On Thursday, September 19, as reported by Fox 5 Atlanta, "a man was taken to the hospital after officials say he was shot by deputies during a confrontation in Coweta County overnight." That confrontation (in which the shooting victim charged police with a weapon but survived the encounter) began as a domestic violence disturbance in the home of the man's parents right here in my neighborhood.

On Friday, September 20, as reported by 11 Alive News Atlanta, "a Newnan man is facing a murder charge in the shooting death of a woman at a local gun shop late Friday night." That man, the owner of the gun shop, lives in his former grandfather's home in my neighborhood.

To be clear, they are not the same man.

Multiple news sources have posted their mugshots. Both of them are middle-aged, overweight, bald, white men. The only thing keeping a witness from picking me instead of them from a police lineup is that I don't have a beard, a distinction that I'll be sure to maintain.

They've always told me I was most likely to die within 10 miles of my home, I just didn't think it would be at the hands of one of my neighbors. Just to be safe, ya'll might want to stay away from my 'hood for a while.

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There's a new yard sign that has been popping up lately around my neighborhood that has a picture of a particular ex-president alongside the words "Let's Go Felon." I don't understand it.

If it's a pro-Trump sign (and it is not an official campaign sign, I checked), why does it advertise that he's a felon? Being a felon is not something that most people would choose to celebrate. Is it supposed to be ironic, by which I mean is it a political statement that the State of New York is an unjust government (with a corrupted jury pool) that has no right to find someone guilty of the crime of falsifying business records? If that's the case, I'd expect it to have sarcastic quotes, you "genius" Trump supporters, you.

On the other hand, if it's an anti-Trump sign, why would any Never Trumper want a picture of that guy in their front yard? I certainly don't. (I see quite enough of him on the evening news, thank you.) Would they post a sign advertising any other felon?

I should mention that I first saw this sign in the yard of a home that also has a family of bigfoot signs, which is making it harder for me to interpret the intention here. Do they love imaginary creatures? Lost causes? Fairy tales? Conspiracy theories? I just can't tell. I can't even knock on the door and ask; they have a gated driveway. If there are actually any bigfeet, they're not actually welcome.

Maybe this is just another thing that will have to remain in the very large bucket of things I cannot understand.

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For years, I've been trying to think of what epitaph I want on my tombstone. My mother is under instructions that if I die weirdly — electrocuted by eels, run over by an ice cream truck, hit by a meteor — I'll want that carved in stone. And if I die normally, she should lie and say that I spontaneously combusted.

On a related note, a recent incident at one of my town's finer dining establishments gives me another idea. "Shot to death in a Hooters parking lot over a plate of wings" would make a pretty darn good tombstone.

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The bitterly cold 13° temperatures we experienced last week did not leave us unscathed.

Believe it or not, this flooded cellar was the result of an exterior spigot freezing and cracking. We thought we had the spigot well covered with an insulated sleeve, but it was just too damn cold for too damn long.

The spigot froze and snapped entirely off. Instead of flooding the yard, the water rushing out of the pipe shot straight into the still-secured sleeve where it hit a dead end and rebounded into the cellar ventilation. The resulting underground swimming pool did a whole lot of damage to the water heater and furnace.

Thanks to a lot of help from restoration professionals, plumbers, HVAC technicians, and electricians, we're getting close to the other side of it now that the temperature is back to an unseasonable 70°, warm for January even by Georgia standards.

The entire experience has taught me two lessons. One, we should tie the insulation sleeve on much more loosely (a frozen yard is better than a flooded basement). And two, winter sucks.

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