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Just in the Nick of Time 2

Every now and then, the timing is more amusing than the actual thing. For example, I once let my sister and her husband use my bedroom when they stayed with us, only for me to have a hilariously hard time getting into a new routine during that time. I did eventually figure it out, but only on the very last day of their stay. Like I said, the timing is sometimes the funniest bit of the whole thing.

In this case, it wasn't so much a slow crescendo that set up the joke. No, in this case, I had the PG&E public safety power shutoff to blame. If you're unfamiliar with what that was, the biggest utility company in California proactively shut off power to lots of people during some inclement weather. The craziest thing about it was that it wasn't even the kind of weather that you normally worry about. It wasn't high heat, extreme cold, pouring rains, or a hurricane. No, the root cause was high winds. Think about that; the wind blew so hard, that the utility company was worried that power lines would be impacted (read: spark fires). I realize that I'm not exactly an old-timer, but that's definitely the first time I've heard of that.

Basically, our power was out. Now, I try to keep to a schedule for these blog posts, so that meant that I was in real danger of breaking my once-per-week streak. I honestly don't remember how long I've been writing my weekly blog post, but if that post I linked is any indication, I have kept to that schedule for somewhere on the order of eight years. That's the sort of thing that becomes an expectation. That's not even so much what my readers expect (I doubt I have more than a handful), but it's become something that I expect to do. It's just become a thing I do.

Still, there was nothing I could do, because our power was out. I wasn't about to drive super far to try to find WiFi, and I wasn't even sure that I could find power all that close to us anyway. I had, sadly, resigned myself to missing my weekly post.

And then ... the power came back on.

Well, then, my friends, the game was afoot. I don't remember the exact time when the power came back on, but it was sometime around 7PM local time. That gave me roughly an hour before my usual post came out, so I had a mad literary scramble on my hands. The nice thing about this deadline was that it cut through my usual planning phases. I simply didn't have the time to try to think through an ideal post for that week. I just had to write.

And write I did. I didn't exactly write in an uninterrupted stream, but I pretty much just got down to work and cranked out a blog post. The best part of the whole thing was the timing. I finished and published my post at 8:02PM, only two minutes after the usually schedule time. I don't think I can quite describe the relief and pride I felt at getting a post done more or less on time when the very electricity conspired against me.

My streak is intact, y'all. Just in the nick of time, indeed.

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