Still no power, and no sign that we will be getting power anytime soon. Want to know how I know?

Does that look like a picture you saw before, earlier in the year, when a tree nearly landed on top of me and took out our electric wires? It’s not. It is the same tree. And the same electric wires. But it’s the post-Milton other tree branch, taking out those electric wires for the second time this year.

I suppose the good news is that it’s unlikely to ever happen again, given that there’s not a lot left of the tree.

On the other hand, there are more trees back there, including this fascinating example:

I’m honestly just mystified by this. Where did the skinny tree on the left come from? How did it wind up nonchalantly leaning against the bigger tree? I guess it’s a branch that came down? Well, that broke off, I guess, since you can’t exactly say it fell down. (Yet! It’s obviously gonna fall someday.) But it is not at all clear to me where it broke off from. The tree farther to the right, not shown in this picture, is the obvious suspect. It’s the tree in the top image, and yeah, it lost its branch but that branch took out the fence and the electric wires, and there weren’t two branches. Plus it just doesn’t look like a branch from that tree. So weird!

But as you can see, it was a pretty solid storm, even here, and yeah, we’ve got no power, no internet, and no timetable for getting either of them back. No one from the power company has even wandered by to look at those wires. Alas!

Fortunately, Christina does have power and internet, so I am currently hanging out at her house, charging my devices and appreciating the quiet of a neighborhood that does not have a generator running at every other house. The noise of the generators is ferocious — I do not understand how people stand it. I hate it and they’re not even in my driveway.

Other things I hate today: poor Sophie has had a seriously upset stomach. Purging from both ends. I have no idea why, and fortunately she still seems lively enough (no hiding underneath things) but I’m not willing to let her off-leash by the fallen electric wires so it has meant a lot of walking. And also the normal anxiety of whether or not I should be taking her to a vet, except, you know, power outages, hurricane recovery, etc. I think she’s okay, because she’s certainly acting okay, but I wish we weren’t hitting a weekend.

Enough whining from me? Yep, because overall, we’re fine, all is well, the storm is over and in the grand scheme of things, I feel pretty fortunate that electricity is not a life-and-death issue for me.

And that said, the weirdest part of yesterday (Thursday, the day of/after the storm) was living in an information vacuum. No power, no internet, and the cell towers were so overloaded that it was mostly impossible to get a website to load. Even sending messages was slow and images wouldn’t go through at all. It was so strange to just be unable to check the news. I don’t consider myself tied to my cell phone, but I kept trying, over and over again, even when it was clearly pointless. Information addiction is a thing, I guess.