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Today I saw that it has been ten years since Princess Diana was killed in a car crash. It really doesn’t seem like it was ten years ago that this happened, I must be getting old, with the years flying by at an increasing pace. It doesn’t seem like her death was yesterday either. It was a while ago, but ten years ago? It’s surprising to me.

It is a sign of age that this is happening to me. It wasn’t that long ago when my adult life was only a few years old, and I only had a few years of adult memories, or memories of things important to adults, like Princess Di’s death. If I only have a few years of adult memory, things that I remember well must be fairly recent. As the years pile on, so do the memories of things that have happened to us, or were important to us, or at least to society. Princess Di’s death certainly didn’t affect me directly, but it was certainly important to our society, so it was registered away in my memory.

Now I may be unique in this in some manner, since I basically do not remember much of anything before high school, so my memory is a little flawed compared to the super-memories that some have. However, as we age, the amount of stuff that we remember grows everyday. Of course the things that we remember well could be several years, or even several decades old. Once it’s in the long term memory, what’s the difference between an event from last year to an event from ten years ago?

I used to be amazed by people who couldn’t remember how old they were, or how long they owned their house, or were in their job, but it’s starting to make sense to me. If you celebrate your birthday every year, your age is easy to remember, because it’s been tracked. But if it’s been a few years since you really paid attention to your birthday, it’s not so easy, and you may need to do a little math.

“Let’s see, I was born in 1973, and it’s 2007, so 2007 minus 1973 is, let’s see, thirty, um, plus four, ah yes, I’m thirty four. Of course.”

I’ve been asked a few times how long I’ve owned my house, or how old my dog, Loki, is. I really don’t know, and again, I’ve got to do the math. Of course, that requires me to know what year I bought my house in or got Loki in (luckily these were in the same year, which helps.) I have to recreate my adulthood.

“I moved to Minnesota over New Years Eve 1999, so I was here in 2000. I started my next job in January of the following year, that would be 2001. I bought my house in July of that year, and got Loki in December of that year, so I’ve owned my house for six years. Really? Six year? That long? How do I still have projects that I wanted to do when I moved in that aren’t complete yet? Jeez, where do the years go…”

Time and memory are interesting things. Everybody experiences them a little differently. To a kid, waiting five minutes for something can be an eternety, but as an adult, slowly trodding through an eight plus hour work day can seem tedious, but tolerable. I suppose as years roll by today, decades will roll by tomorrow. If you believe one group, somebody alive today will live to be 1000, so maybe the centuries will start rolling by soon!

I was saving this list for my return from China as I hoped to add a few animals to the list, which I did. While I know of other people that have eaten more animals and more exotic animals, I’m using this list as an excuse to try new and unusual foods.

Yak
Sea Horse
Scorpion
Rabbit
Seal Oil (in “Eskimo Ice Cream”)
Jelly fish
Black Bear
Reindeer (Caribou)
Whitetail Deer
Duck tongue
Goat
Goat’s milk
Octopus
American Bison (Buffalo)
Snail
Squid  

I’ve left out the usually eaten animals, and have never kept track of fish, so the list is longer if you add those in.

The saga continues and it happened again last night. More heavy thunderstorms came through the Twin Cities. This time they came with reports of hail as big as 5″ around, and it flooded I-494 and 35W near my house. 494 was actually closed overnight with up to 3′ of water that could not drain fast enough into the storm drains.

I’m not sure about the hail or rain at my house, but I am still enjoying my power outage. When I left for work this morning it had been 75 hours since I had power. They say I should have power today, but with the storms last night, we’ll see.

Last night I got to clean out the refridgerator and freezer. Luckily, although everything had thawed, nothing had started to rot, so the clean-up was painfully expensive, but no where near as gross as I had prepared myself for. Between the food I just threw away and eating out at every meal, this is getting expensive.

I did rig up power in my bedroom last night to ease my pain. One car battery + one 500w inverter = a fan and lamp in my bedroom, which was really nice, since it was still stinking hot last night. Of course, I woke up quite dehydrated today, but at least I sort of slept. I have a huge inverter that could power my window AC, but I’d need a few more batteries to run that I’d guess.

I clearly have not appeased the Gods of Electrons yet to bless me with restored power. I wish I knew how to appease them, I’d really like my power back.

(Note, my electricity was restored on Tuesday after a 77 hours outage.)

Electricity is great. There, I’ve said it. While I’ve had my disagreements with it in the past, I have to admit that, for the most part, it really is great. I mention this because, not two weeks after the 35W bridge collapsed, we had a monster of a thunderstorn roll through the Twin Cities very early on Saturday morning. Normally, a thunderstorm isn’t anything worth commenting (or blogging) about, but this one was the biggest and longest storm I remember, with at least 30 minutes of solid, uninterupted thunder and lightning. Thanks to 60 MPH winds, there were lots of large trees pulled out of the ground, and branches ripped from trees. This included my neighbor’s 50′ pine tree that was up-rooted into another neighbor’s garage. Oops.

Oh, and we lost power in my corner of the Cities. I’ve only lost power a couple of times in the past, and never for more than an hour, but this outage was, actually is, different. My power went out at 3:30AM on Saturday and as of this morning, over two days later, is still out.

It’s amazing what electricity does for you. I immediately knew that I had no TV, no computer, and no lights, but as the weekend progressed, I realized just what I lost. Besides the boredom of no TV and no computer, my refridgerator is out. I thought about cooking up all of my food and eating it over the weekend, only to realize I can’t cook anything. Hmm, maybe there is something to gas stoves. At first, I thought that the food might make it if I kept the refridgerator closed, not realizing the extent of the outage, but that did not work out. Tonight I will have the fun of removing the stinky mess…

The AC was out, of course, but as I sat in the heat (it was 94 or so on Saturday outside, and at least 85 inside) I kept thinking that I needed to turn on a fan to cool off. Oops, no fans either.

I thought about checking my email with my laptop, since it has a battery, but I realized that the DSL modem and wi-fi router both need power, so no internet. Plus, the battery on my laptop is only good for about an hour these days.

Reading by flashlight is not the easiest thing to do, but luckily, my PDA phone provided some entertainment during the weekend, and a way to check my email.

Unlike when I was growing up, in a house with a well, I do still have water and heat at my house, so at the very least I was able to shower and such over the weekend. A cool shower does work well to cool you off without AC.

These last few days have really made me appreciete the electron and what it has done for me on a daily basis. I have under appreciated it, I have taken it for granted, and that’s really a mistake on my part. Thank you electricity, I’m sorry if I have hurt or offended you. Please, please come back to me, I really need you. I promise I’ll treat you better this time, really!

As I’m sure everybody who reads this knows, the I-35W bridge across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed, killing several people, and injuring many more. Thankfully, it looks like the number of people killed was very low for an interstate bridge collapse during rush hour. Nobody I know was injured, and for that I am very thankful.

I was up north at the cabin when it happened, and watched this “local” catastrophe on TV like most of the country. I can’t speak for all of America, but I know that I have become desensitized watching events like these on TV. They don’t seem real, it’s just TV. My brain wants to see things for itself to help make it real, so today I headed into Minneapolis to see the bridge for myself.

Unfortunately, for reasons I don’t understand, every spot in Minneapolis that is within view of the bridge was closed by Police. “It’s a federal crime scene” as one officer put it. Because of that the 10th Ave bridge next to the I-35W bridge, and the pedestrian Stone Arch bridge were closed to the public, as was a huge area of buildings, roads and paths along the river and near the bridge. I’m sure the river is closed well above and below the bridge as well. While I understand keeping people a safe distance from the bridge and the recovery and investigation, it seems like making sure that nobody can even see it is excessive. People can’t heal from things like this when the problem is hidden from them…

While I was wandering around, I did manage to take a few photos of the bridge. They aren’t great, but here they are.

It will be interesting to see what this does in the Twin Cities. This has currently closed one interstate, two of the bridges across the Mississippi River, a railroad spur that ran under the bridge, and the river itself. I’d guess it will be two years before 35W reopens, although the river and railroad should be able to open sooner I’d guess.