Opening act is done, headliner is on the way

Those of you who follow me on social media, or who saw the posts that went up on angelahighland.wordpress.com, LJ, and Dreamwidth last night, know we lost power around 2:30 yesterday afternoon. We were down all evening, but at least as of right now, we’re back.

How Are You?

Yesterday evening, we amused ourselves with playing around with instruments and with listening to one of the Big Finish audio adventures off my phone, piped through a Bluetooth speaker. The Cloisters of Terror turned out to be a delightful thing to listen to during a power outage! In no small part because Mr. Baker was in fine form in that story.

Here are the sorts of conversations we have in our house when the power is out!

Dara (while trying to figure out the chord progression for a song): OMG this chart doesn’t HAVE an A flat! They just skipped it!

Me (nodding sagely): ‘What damn fool would want to play an A flat chord on a bouzouki?’

And also:

Me: Okay good chiro has power. So I will go out tomorrow and bring back any necessary things. Be thinking about necessary things I can bring back.

Dara: Electricity! 4 buckets of electricity!

Paul: I think the fridge is going to need more than 4 buckets.

Dara: Okay, 6 buckets! Go to Costco.

George, bless his little kitty heart, kept wandering around mewing in a sort of “EVERYTHING IS DARK AND WEIRD AND QUIET WHY IS IT LIKE THIS AND WHY ARE YOU ALL IN THIS OTHER ROOM OH HEY THE FIRE IS ON YAY WARM”. And once we settled in to listen to the audio, George curled up in front of the fireplace to go zzzzzzzz.

I went to bed around 10:30ish and woke up just before 1am when the noise of the neighbors’ generators shut up. I sleepily realized the clock was blinking, checked the time on the phone (which I was keeping by our bed), and noted 12:54. So our power must have come back just a few minutes before that, long enough for neighbors to go YAY and turn their generators off.

Dara brought the servers back up this morning, and I scampered out to go to chiro and Safeway and the booze store (so that I could replenish the cake vodka and Baileys supply, and OH BY THE WAY YOU GUYS, I did find another bottle of Pumpkin Spice Baileys, which is an actual thing that exists and you should try it if those are words that sound like fun to you). Dara is heading out now that I’m home again, as the Norwescon concom has a meeting today, and they kinda can’t cancel it, because it’s at the hotel and they’re contractually obligated to use the rooms when they’re booked for. But she’s going to scamper back here ASAP when the meeting is done.

As of this writing Seattle City Light has a mere 11 customers out. Puget Sound Energy has 5,125 down still. And I gotta say, cranky as I am that PSE has been so random in our power service this year, their crews were out last night working their asses off. And that we got power back in the dead of night means their crews were out there in the wet dark, working for us. So kudos to them for that.

The current High Wind Warning is supposed to kick in at 3pm this afternoon and run until 2am, with the peak winds now expected between 5pm and 10pm. Cliff Mass has his current forecast up here, and from what he’s saying, the storm is still aiming for north of us, but we’ll be on the very edge of it. Seattle proper may dodge a bullet, but chances are high that Kenmore will get hit harder. And even if damaging winds don’t smack us, chances are VERY high we will lose power again, possibly for days. Expect that angelahighland.com will go down again, in which case I will continue to post updates on angelahighland.wordpress.com as well.

And given that the wind conditions yesterday still caused quite a lot of damage (note the gallery of pics on the Seattle Times’ updates here, PARTICULARLY the snapped power pole), I’m still expecting things to be very, very messy tonight and into tomorrow.

Brace for impact, Cascadians. Charge all your devices. Do your laundry while you still have power. Songda is COMING.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

An undaunted by Typhoon Songda book roundup post

The last gasp of Typhoon Songda is on the way into the Puget Sound region as I type this, and chances are high we’ll lose power! But before that happens, hey, let’s get this post out of my Drafts queue, shall we?

Had a little bit of credit on the iTunes/iBooks store, so I grabbed a few Tor titles from that store–since Tor publishes DRM-free and DRM-free is the ONLY way I will buy from the iBooks store:

• Song in the Silence, The Lesser Kindred, and Redeeming the Lost, all by Elizabeth Kerner. This is a complete trilogy, The Tale of Lanen Kaelar. I read Book 1 ages ago in print, and kept meaning to get caught up on it. It’s a fantasy story with a side helping of romance, which as y’all know is Relevant to My Interests. And this one had a decent take on a dragon hero that could ever so helpfully shapeshift to human form, as I recall. It’s been long enough ago since I read Book 1 that rereading it will be basically a clean slate.
• Karen Memory, by Elizabeth Bear. Historical fantasy. Grabbed this because it’s set in the early days of Seattle, in our days of “seamstresses”! (And if you have ever taken the Underground Tour in downtown Seattle, you know why that’s a significant word in our history!)
• Updraft, by Fran Wilde. Fantasy, YA. Have had my eye on this one since it came out last year, and since Book 2 just dropped, the price on this ebook finally dropped to 9.99. Wanted this because I thought the description of the society where it’s set sounded interesting, oriented around flight and altitude.
• Last Song Before Night, by Ilana C. Meyer. Fantasy. Got this one because of the protagonist being a musician, and music appears to play very heavily into the plot. And I’m definitely partial to music-related SF/F, as y’all know!

And while I was at it, I also happened to pick up a couple of books in print from Third Place:

• Voyage of the Basilisk, by Marie Brennan. Book 3 of the Lady Trents because yep, keeping up with the whole “I want this in print as well as digital” thing for this series.
• This Gulf of Time and Stars, by Julie Czerneda. Paperback of Book 1 of her current Clan series, because yep, Czerneda I buy in print and digital as well!

58 for the year.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.