Power, Presence

A Few Hours Without Power

May 23, 2026

Which (Not Surprisingly) Made Me Grumpy

This is the kind of reading you do when the power goes out, because how does the generator work again? Not exactly reading for pleasure.

Our power went out this week—unfortunate and unexpected. It’s always hard to know what to do when the power goes out. You can’t know initially if it’s going to be a short outage, one that lasts a few minutes or an hour or two—or one that will last for hours or even days. It makes a difference, because if it’s just a blip, there’s no need to drag out the generator. But if it’s longer, it’s worth the effort, mostly because a generator will save all the food you just bought at Costco and stored in your freezer. You’d hate to lose your frozen turkey burgers which were on sale, your frozen chicken thighs, your turkey lunchmeat, your shredded cheese. A generator will also run your Wi-Fi and charge your phone, which of course is basically out of battery when the power abruptly disappears.

Initially this week, I was sure it wouldn’t be an extended outage. It’s not like we were having wild, crazy weather. It wasn’t raining, snowing, or storming. We weren’t really even into fire season yet. The power company notifies us of planned outages when they expect the weather to be especially windy and fire prone, but there wasn’t one scheduled this week. Sure, it was windy, but not crazily so. I noticed that a few of my trees were losing limbs, but overall it didn’t seem like that big of a deal.

Except apparently it was.

According to my local Facebook group, which immediately becomes my most important news source when the power disappears, a tree fell on some power lines up in Alta. Somebody posted a picture of the downed tree and the cavalcade of PG&E trucks that arrived to fix the damage. When I saw that, I decided that it looked like it might be an extended outage after all and that it was probably a good idea to pull out the generator. Continue Reading…

Presence

A Little Ramble About My Planner, Apple Watch, and the NYT “The Morning” Email

April 25, 2026

Every day is a fresh start.

That’s what the front cover of my at-home planner says. It’s a sturdy, hard-bound book with pages for goal setting, cutesy stickers, and sections for end-of–the-month reflections where you share your favorites including a check-in section where you write “One thing I will let go of from this month” and “One thing I will embrace next month.”

Sigh.

I don’t actually use the goal setting pages the right way. I have three months of blank reflection pages for the first three months of this year, and the stickers that came along with it are mostly still attached to the sheets. Sometimes I’ll think to use one. “My Favorite!” is meant to be placed on a day when something wonderful happened. Or there are stickers that say “Messy Bun and Getting Stuff Done” or simply, “Yay!”

Yay!

Yay, yay, yay.

In spite of my crabbiness, I like this planner. It’s the second year I’ve bought it. Maybe I don’t use it the right way, but the way the days are laid out has been helpful for me. Also, the reminder that “every day is a fresh start” is a golden one. I need this daily reminder, because the days lately have been rough. One of the first things I usually do when I wake up is read my New York Times (NYT) daily email, “The Morning.” It is rare that there is not something in this that makes me want to cry. This morning’s pleasant factoids: “The Trump administration, as part of an effort to revive capital punishment, will reinstitute firing squads as an allowed form of execution.” And the acting attorney general will start pushing investigations into Trump’s adversaries “in an attempt to win his job permanently.”

Yay!

Yay, yay, yay.

Here is what I need to remember, especially when I didn’t sleep well the night before. Every day truly is a fresh start. My Apple Watch has a supposedly helpful sleep tracker, but it also sometimes can be a bit of a bully. The other night it scolded me because I went to bed too late and woke up a few times. Its verdict: I only slept “OK,” instead of “High” or “Very High” and might not have gotten the rest I needed. On a morning after a night of poor sleep, it’s important to realize that it was just one night, and tonight will be a new night for sleep. Every day is a fresh start, and every night is, too.

Also, the reminder that “every day is a fresh start” helps me in weeks when I haven’t written much. A little daily writing is good for me, for my mental and emotional health. This is one area where I’ve thankfully grown past needing to grade my daily attempts (and I’m glad my Apple Watch doesn’t evaluate me in this area!) The point with my writing is just to show up and get something on the page. There is no good or awesome or terrible or failure. Showing up is the only thing that matters.

Continue Reading…