Yesterday I was sitting at home watching The Love Boat on local channel 30.2. Harry Morgan (who played Col. Sherman Potter on M*A*S*H) was a passenger on the ship. He played Gopher, then Isaac, then Julie in gin rummy, and they lost hundreds of dollars to Morgan. Doc figured out the secret: Morgan was playing with a marked deck.
The crew devised an elaborate scheme to give Morgan his comeuppance: Gopher playing, Doc spying on Morgan’s hand with binoculars, Isaac broadcasting thinly-veiled hints over the PA system as to the cards Morgan held. Within minutes, I surmised I would see Morgan lose all the money he won from the crew, and then some.
Except, I didn’t.
At approximately 4:46, the lights flickered a couple of times. Then the power went out completely in my apartment.
The TV went black.
The clocks went black.
My MacBook kicked over to battery power. But my router was dead, so I couldn’t pass the time by getting on the Internet.
Even the toilet wouldn’t refill with water when I flushed it.
Worst of all on a June day in Memphis, my air conditioner shut off.
After enduring 10 minutes of darkness and boredom, I opened my apartment’s front door. The lights were on in the hallway, making me believe it was just my unit.
“Did MLGW mistakenly cut me off?” I wondered. I am current on my account with the utility company. I just got a new bill for $106, but it’s not due until the last week of the month. Besides, I didn’t think they did cutoffs on Sunday.
I decided to get on Twitter and see if there was any news of outages. I took my phone off Wi-Fi so it wouldn’t try to connect to the dead router. But it couldn’t get cell service. Now I was really confused.
I put sandals on and rode the elevator downstairs. In the lobby I ran into my building’s maintenance engineer. “It’s the entire building,” he told me. “The power’s out all the way to the Pyramid.”
Wow, that’s unusual. I’ve been told my building is on a double circuit, buried underground, and it’s the same circuit St. Jude is on. That circuit is priority-one for MLGW. In 20 years in my current home, I have lost power maybe three times. Even during 2003’s Hurricane Elvis, I never lost power.
I stepped outside in the rain onto the Main Street Mall. I looked north and the traffic lights were out as far as I could see.
Then I looked south. The light at Monroe was out, but the lights at Gayoso and Union were working. “That means Blind Bear is open,” I thought. “I’ll go there and use their Wi-Fi to get on Twitter.”
MLGW tweeted that there were many outages, but it was hard to tell the extent. Their outage map showed 10-100 customers in my area without power, but in my building alone MLGW has 112 customers.
By the time I returned home at 11 PM, the power was back on. Weird thing though… my AT&T service remains knocked out. Not sure what’s going on there. If you need to reach me today, might want to use Facebook Messenger as opposed to text. (EDIT: It’s fixed now. I can receive texts.)
On to the news…
The I-55 bridge is back open. It was closed over the weekend for construction.
MWN says we’ll have wonderful weather today! Light north wind, 81/65. As we get toward tomorrow morning there could be a shower or storm.
Today is National Jerky Day. I’d recommend a visit to DGX to celebrate. They have many varieties.
Things are looking good at The Peanut Shoppe!
The annual Juneteenth Festival happens in Health Sciences Park Saturday and Sunday.
WREG has the story behind Juneteenth and how it became a federal holiday.
A Downtown liquor store is for sale. $340,000 is the asking price. The address is not listed.
Astronomers say there is a highly habitable planet just 4 light-years away.
FiveThirtyEight editors’ chat: Why the latest Trump indictment looks so bad for him
That’s all for now. Time for me to catch up on the stuff I didn’t get done yesterday. Back tomorrow with more news.