Electricity and intruders

Hot showers! Electric lighting! Microwave oven! Refrigerator! Furnace! Telephone service!

After a week without power, all of those things seem like outrageous luxuries.

Judging from the clock on the oven, power was restored to our house about 11:50 a.m. yesterday. I returned from my errands in town about 2 p.m. and emptied 6-pound bags of ice into the two coolers that were keeping our perishables cold on the back porch. I noticed the kitchen lights were on when I walked through the back door and immediately called Maria to share the good news.

We are mindful, of course, that the power could fail again while electric utility crews rebuild the ice storm-shattered system. The local postmistress told me her power came on last Saturday and blacked out about 24 hours later. Fortunately, it was only about  5-hour outage for her.

We left the perishables in the coolers overnight, just in case the power went off and also to give us a chance to give the fridge a thorough cleaning.

When I let the dogs out this morning, I discovered one of the coolers - the smaller one without a latch - was raided last night by one or more raccoons. The carrying handle was up, which prevented the lid from opening completely, but it could be opened enough to let a raccoon reach in and drag out a couple of bags of frozen vegetables and a partially used jar of Hershey's hot fudge ice cream topping. The jar apparently had enough residue around the cap to drive them nuts and judging from the claw marks on the label, they worked hard to get it open, but without success. They didn't seem all that interested in the Brussels sprouts and carrots.

Getting the jar out of the cooler and onto the concrete back porch floor had to be a fairly noisy enterprise, but our two dogs slept right through it. So much for canine keen senses and hyper-alertness.

We still don't have cable/Internet and given the quality of service in good weather, I don't expect to see it for another week or two or three or maybe more. But we have our Blueray DVD player and I can come to Hastings every morning - like right now- to blog, surf and do my other Internet stuff.

Now that I don't have to devote so much of my attention to keeping the house warm and lighted, I can think about other things like the fact that it's now Feb. 3 and we haven't seen our tenants' rent check for February.

And like the clusterfuck parade of tax cheats and ethically compromised dirtbags Comrade Hussein is proposing for his cabinet. I refuse to believe these people are so enormously talented and essential to our economic recovery that we have to put aside our concerns about their honesty or their competence in preparing their tax returns.

But that's what you get when you quit running elections on the basis of real issues and turn the campaign into the political equivalent of American Idol with the corrupt mainstream media coaching the sheep on how to vote.

It almost makes me wish the power would go off again.