As I sat down to write today’s blog the power went off in the neighborhood.   The traffic lights, street lights both in my immediate neighborhood and the one directly to the east (which I can see out my bedroom window were all out).

My blogging was put off for the 30 minutes or so while the power was out.  Desktop computers don’t work when the power is out.  The pads were working but there was no LAN connection.

In Edmonton Alberta, Canada’s most northerly city with a population of over a million, in the middle of winter a power outage can be a scary thing.  The central heating needs electric power to run and if it’s not available for a while it get’s cold.

Makes you think

Sitting reading my book waiting for the power to come back,  with a few candles spread around,  which my wife had found and lit, I realized how critical our dependency on electric power has become.  That is, for most large city dwellers.   Rural dwellers are probably a bit more independent.

We are lucky it was so short and I realize there are lot of bad weather related power outages in other parts of North America, during the bad weather seasons, that last a lot longer than the 30 minutes we waited.

Still it is pretty sobering to contemplate how dependent we have become on electricity.   I guess it was a bit of a wake up call for me.  I wonder how many people are running out to Canadian Tire and picking up a gas power generator as we speak.

And the good news

On the positive side, this short outage was something to blog about.  On the really negative side, it will take me hours to reboot, check and recover all my hardware and software infrastructure.  Ah well.