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The day started out with promise. I mean, not the literal day itself. The only promise in waking up at 3 a.m. was that I got to use the extra hour from setting the clocks back to resuscitating the fire in the wood-burning stove. It was down to toasty embers, but I was able to get it going again and bring some heat back to the library.

Anyway, the real promise was when I got up around 6:15 and hit the electric company’s outage map. Clicking on our zone, I saw that our power was projected to be restored TODAY! AT 8:30 A.M.!

Now, I didn’t think that time was likely to be met, since the split power line is still lying in two of my neighbors’ yards, and it would presumably need to be spliced or replaced, (unless there’s some sorta patching they could do to work around it), but I had hopes that we’d have our power back sometime today!

An hour or so later, the map updated to 12:30 p.m. today. Another two hours, and the map reverted back to Friday, Nov. 9 for the projected restore time. I got all crestfallen, and settled in for a full day without leaving the neighborhood. We walked the dogs, met some neighbors, kept the fire stoked, and otherwise hung out in our lovely library, where I finished The Manticore and began Worlds of Wonder.

While Amy napped at mid-day, I went upstairs into the cold (about 58° F) and finished up the article I need to get out tomorrow to close my Nov/Dec issue. Riddled with the combo of work-anxiety and outage-anxiety, I scarfed down all sorts of snacks while I was up there. Because I’m me, this meant cashews, trail mix, figs, and the like, as opposed to the three bags of Halloween candy that have been sitting in our kitchen for a week.

Also, I called United to ask what’ll happen if I don’t get on the flight to Seattle that I’m supposed to take tomorrow afternoon for a business trip. I already informed the biotech that I’m supposed to visit that I won’t be able to go if we don’t have power back, since I’m not capable of abandoning my wife & doggies in the cold and dark. (And with the shift in weather and the clock-change, it’s going to be colder and darker this week.)

The United rep told me that I’m eligible for a Superstorm Sandy exception to their flight change rules, and that I’ll be able to use the tickets to Seattle anytime within the 12 months that I bought them. I feel bad for the biotech, since they’re putting on a big day of sessions and a facility tour that they’d love for me to be a part of, but I think they’re understanding about the circumstances. (The event is on Wednesday, so if we get power back by Tuesday, I may be able to get out there in time, and maybe stay over an extra day and decompress there before heading home. I also have this vision of going to the office tomorrow, finishing up the mag, finding out we have power restored, zooming home, packing a bag, and heading out to Newark for the trip. It’d be in keeping with the rest of this craziness.)

But again, are these complaints? Hardly. During this morning’s walk with the dogs, we met Ann, our neighbor whose house was destroyed by Hurricane Irene last year. It took almost a year to rebuild the house (insurance, code, etc.), and they moved back in 6 weeks before Sandy struck. (They suffered no damage this time around.)

We hadn’t talked with her since Irene, so this was the first time we heard the story from her perspective. All we knew was that a huge tree by the side of her house fell in the wind and crashed through the attic, parallel to the house itself.

She told us that her family — her husband, her two kids (college age, as I recall), and her 94-year-old mom — had been in the living room upstairs during Irene. They heard a crack — the tree snapping then hitting their side of the house — and then everything went black. Why? Because the entire contents of their attic fell into the living room and the rest of the upstairs.

She told us she couldn’t move her head, because she was trapped under junk, and had to pry herself loose. It was dark, and she had no idea what shape anyone else was in. One of her daughters, upon hearing the initial crack of the tree, got up and was trying to get out when the roof fell in. Her mother started yelling, “so I knew she was okay.”

Ann suffered a broken nose from the impact, but everyone else got out without a significant injury. I told her that if our place got hit like that, I’d likely be smushed under the central air-conditioning unit, which would only be fitting because of the work I put into getting it replaced this summer.

“I told my husband that I’m worried because our central air is right over our bedroom in the new house,” she said. “He told me, ‘Come on: what are the chances it would happen twice?'”

She was pretty upbeat, considering the potential for flashback-trauma, and I told her about the house a mile or so up the street that had gotten pasted by a tree. “Not as bad as yours last year, of course.”

“We win!” she said.

So, yeah, we’re going another day without power and it’s getting colder. I’d like to watch the Giants-Steelers game, but I’ll get by without it. I mean, it’s not like my house caved in and brained me with a stack of old cassette tapes and a pile of Ranger Ricks and Dungeons & Dragons books.

Counting Monday, even though we lost power only at 9 p.m., this is Day 6 of The Big Mess. This morning, the electric co. revised its estimate for when we’ll have power back. It’s now end of Nov. 9, rather than Nov. 11. I’m hoping we gain two days each morning, which would get us all square by Monday.

We decided to pay a visit to my dad, who lives about 10 miles from us. He lost power from early Monday afternoon until Wednesday morning, but has been cruising along since. We figured we’d take care of a week’s worth of laundry, charge up our devices, visit his local supermarket (which never lost power and has stayed in stock with a lot of stuff) and generally take a little break from the house. I love my home and the new library, but I’m going kinda nuts hanging out in the same room or two day after day.

Since the wood-burning stove has been going non-stop since Monday night, I figured it would die out while we were gone, giving me the opportunity to clean out all the ashes and start over with a new fire. I never had a fireplace or a stove growing up, so I have no idea about how one manages these things.

Amy drove us to Dad’s around 11 a.m., since we’re conserving gas in the Subaru for when we have to make The Big Escape. On the way, we passed a Lukoil that had dozens of cars lined up to get gas. Today’s the first day of NJ’s even/odd gas rationing system, but it didn’t look like it made much of a difference. I can’t report on much of the scene, since I’m not wasting gas waiting on line for hours to gas up my car. Funny how that works.

Anyway, Dad was doing fine. He had a EPL match to watch on his giant TV, a huge computer for me to move down to his car, so he could deliver it to a client, and all sorts of things that I could only consider The Luxuries of Electricity, like working lights and a microwave. We plugged our chargers in, started the laundry and showered. Amy pointed out that it’s great to not walk out of a hot shower into a 58° house. I concurred.

I talked with Dad while Amy got in touch with her folks in Louisiana and then read in another room. Dad mentioned that the lights had flickered right before we arrived, but laughed it off. We hadn’t talked during the week, so it was good to catch up. He was amazed that we had no phone or data at all for that 40-hour stretch Tuesday/Wednesday. I told him, “If you’d had a heart attack or something, there’s literally no way you could have gotten a message to me during that time.” I suppose it could just have easily been Verizon’s tower as AT&T’s, but grrr.

Once the first load of wash was in the dryer, we hit the supermarket and picked up some ingredients for Amy’s beef stew, as well as a “red velvet muffin” because why the hell not? On the way back to Dad’s, we noticed that the Lukoil line had diminished, probably because of a police officer at the end telling newbies that they were too late to get on line. The weather turned colder today (around 48°) and I felt bad for the people standing on line carrying gas tanks. On balance, still happy not to have bought a generator.

In Dad’s dining room, I took out my Air and started working on the last article for the November/December ish of my magazine, so I can get that out the door once we set up our new office Monday morning. I have almost enough material in, but it would be a much better piece if I’d been able to hit up more people for quotes. I’m just glad I got some requests out on the Friday before the storm.

And that’s when the power went out at my dad’s house.

Seriously. This is now two days in a row that power has gone down in the place where I’m working on the magazine. Either it’s me, or it’s a sign that I’m not meant to finish this ish.

We helped Dad hook up his critical electric stuff to the line that his neighbor strung over earlier in the week. He lives in an upscale neighborhood, and his wealthy next-door neighbor apparently has an immense generator.

I was bummed to find out that the first load of wash hadn’t finished drying. The second, of course, was all wet. We hauled all that to the car, along with our electronics and some large water bottles that we refilled during our visit. On the way home, we noticed that the power was still on by that Lukoil and the supermarket, so we hoped that Dad’s outage was a passing, local blip.

Once we got home, Amy got started on the stew while I got to work on the laundry, figuring out what had dried and what needed to be hung up by the stove. Speaking of which, the stove managed not to die out completely, so I cleared a ton of ashes, soaked ’em in the backyard, and got the fire restarted pretty quickly.

Half an hour later, Dad texted to let me know that the power had come back on, and that we should come back over. I told him we’re saving gas, but that we’ll come by and kill his power again in the next few days.

(But seriously, we’ll move into his guest room with the dogs if this outage keeps up for a few more days.)

The day started off with bad news, but took a turn for the goofy.

This morning, after I got the kettle going for our coffee (have I told you about my Emergency Coffee Management System yet? If not, I’ll do so tomorrow), I checked out the outage map for our electric company on my iPad. Since the power first went down, all the “hot-spots” had a status of “Assessing damage,” along with a little take on what was causing the outage: wire problem, pole down, etc.

This morning, we finally had an estimated time for restoring power (yay!): Nov. 11 at 11:30 p.m. (boooo…)

I closed the browser window and got back to making our coffee. I brought it downstairs and gave my wife the bad news. I was mentally juggling the amount of firewood remaining, the gas in my Subaru, and other factors that would have to hold up for the next 9 days, including my fraying sanity.

Half an hour later, I thought to check out the status for other zones on the map. All of them had the same estimated time for repair, so I felt less hopeless and more reassured that Rockland Electric was merely trying to cover its ass and make sure that all repairs were “in less than 2 weeks”.

But I had other things on my mind.

Last night, I got news that my company found some satellite space for us in the town of Glen Rock, so those of us who had issues of our magazines to put out had to come in and get pages going. At that point, I went into crazy triage mode, trying to figure out which features were closest to finished, what writing I still had to do, how I was going to accommodate a Q&A that came in 500 words longer than anticipated, and a million other factors. On top of that, my associate editor’s pages were still on her iMac in our office, making them essentially inaccessible for today’s work session.

Most important, I was trying to figure out how I was going to get to the satellite office. See, there’s one main road in and out of our town: Skyline Drive, colloquially known as “the mountain.” Because of fallen trees and power lines, it was closed after the storm came in on Monday afternoon. When Amy & I wanted to drive out to civilization on Wednesday, we had to take the secondary road out, Ringwood Ave., and that was a bumper-to-bumper mess. I was considering whether it would use less gas to take that route or to go all the way up to New York state via Sloatsburg Rd., which would likely have no traffic, but would be a bunch longer.

Gas is still more valuable than gold right now, and I want to keep consumption to a minimum.

I decided I’d try to go via Skyline Dr., and if it was still closed, I’d decide on a dime which of the other routes to try. I cruised up the lower parts of the road, heading toward the last turn-off, Cannonball Rd., where the sawhorses would be situated if the road was closed. Skyline curves slightly on that approach, so I couldn’t see whether the mountain was blocked or not as I closed in. But there was a car a bit ahead of me, so I kept looking to see if it was braking or turning off for Cannonball. When I saw it cruise ahead without the slightest flash of its taillights, I let out a cheer and was more enthused than I’ve been by anything else this week. I zoomed over Skyline with 3 or 4 other cars, probably the lightest rush hour traffic the mountain has ever seen.

From there, it was a quick trip to the satellite office. I got lots done on the issue in the next few hours, ironing out page after page with my art director. They were hoping to get our mag out today, but there was no chance of that happening, as I still needed to write a shortish article that would need at least a few phone calls and some online research. I promised we’d have the last pages done by Monday at noon.

While we worked, we traded stories from the past few days. Most of the coworkers at the office hadn’t lost power during the storm, or had it restored within a day. They all had awful tales about the behavior at the gas stations near their homes or on the highways. I’m still glad we went without a generator.

And during the morning, Amy texted me to let me know that our neighbors’ Tree of Damocles was being cut down!

I guarded against the excessive hope that they’d also replace the split power line and get our neighborhood back on the grid. I figure this is a matter of baby steps. First, get the tree down. Then, replace the transformer that blew out. (Rumor has it one of our neighbors who still had power on Tuesday decided to “test” his whole-house generator. In so doing, he fed too much power into the line and knocked out his part of the street.) Then replace that split line and hook us up!

So I persevered on the issue, and was just finishing my editorial, “Operation Blackout,” when the power died in our satellite office.

No, seriously. It just shut off. The building — and, we assume, the neighborhood — lost power.

We were all working on laptops, so no files were lost, but we couldn’t move anything to the servers and thus our day was done. I gave my art director a few files on a thumb drive, and we all helped move the servers and other equipment back down to the IT director’s car.

We figured out a place to convene on Monday morning, and all headed our separate ways. On the trip home, I marveled at more tree-on-house violence, and remained thankful that we got off easy, all things considered.

And now, back to The Manticore (and that article I have to write over the weekend)!