power

Yesterday's edition of the neighborhood mailing list (I get a daily digest) was full of reports from pockets of our neighborhood that still haven't gotten their power back. That was Friday, and the windy storm that knocked all those trees down was on Tuesday. Today's paper confirms that there are still several thousand customers without power in the immediate area, and some of them are in our town.

The reason for the delay, of course, is the vast number of incidents overwhelming the crews that need to clean them up (and, the mailing list reports suggest, the exhaustion of workers who need to commute hours to get here, as people in such lines of work can't possibly afford to live here, but that's another matter). It hasn't hit us personally, which is good, because right now I'm buried in collating all the corrections for the proofs of the next issue of Tolkien Studies (that's the long-delayed 2022 issue), including some confusions that the publisher made of the illustrations (mostly musical scores) in one article, rendered more hazardous by their having renumbered them all. We missed one of the glitches ourselves; fortunately the author noticed it. Read your proofs, authors! Deadline is tight, and I don't need inaccessibility to my computer right now.

I had to dodge some fallen trees on a drive home from the City after the previous storm cycle last month, but this one hasn't been much to me personally, except for the twice-canceled Sondheim show. I did have to go out in the height of the rain for a medical appointment some distance away, but having repeatedly to hold my breath while they ran the ultrasound was more discomforting than anything involved in driving there. It currently looks as if our area will be spared the brunt of the next storm coming in a couple of days, though down south the San Bernardino Mountains towns that were socked in with snowfall may be getting more of it; the news article didn't specify that. In the meantime, between storms, it's cracking 70 F for the first time this year. There will be plenty more where that came from. I almost didn't need a jacket last night attending a concert by the Philharmonia Baroque and Apollo's Fire presenting a variety of diaspora Jewish ethnic music. Next week I'm attending a concert of wind chamber music by victims of the Nazi Holocaust, and this seemed like an appropriate prelude. Some of it was pretty haunting.