{"id":26731,"date":"2023-06-12T07:36:48","date_gmt":"2023-06-12T12:36:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/?p=26731"},"modified":"2023-06-12T10:48:42","modified_gmt":"2023-06-12T15:48:42","slug":"monday-update-212","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/2023\/06\/12\/monday-update-212\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday update"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I was sitting at home watching The Love Boat<\/em> on local channel 30.2. Harry Morgan (who played Col. Sherman Potter on M*A*S*H<\/em>) 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Except, I didn’t.<\/p>\n

At approximately 4:46, the lights flickered a couple of times. Then the power went out completely in my apartment.<\/p>\n

The TV went black.<\/p>\n

The clocks went black.<\/p>\n

My MacBook kicked over to battery power. But my router was dead, so I couldn’t pass the time by getting on the Internet.<\/p>\n

Even the toilet wouldn’t refill with water when I flushed it.<\/p>\n

Worst of all on a June day in Memphis, my air conditioner shut off.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n

On to the news…<\/p>\n

The I-55 bridge is back open.<\/a> It was closed over the weekend for construction.<\/p>\n

MWN<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Today is National Jerky Day<\/a>. I’d recommend a visit to DGX to celebrate. They have many varieties.<\/p>\n

Things are looking good at The Peanut Shoppe!<\/p>\n