Least it's not forty below out there...

After a lightning storm the likes of which you wouldn't believe (constant lightning and excruciatingly loud thunder for three straight hours!), the power in our whole block got zapped out around midnight.  This was, of course, extremely aggravating because we're just at the tail end of yet another heat wave and so I was sort of considering my little fan to be pretty indispensable.  The next morning, eleven hours later, there was still no power (and I don't even want to think about the food going bad in the fridge and freezer), so I gave up and just came to work.  On a Sunday.  Which meant dashing around the building looking for a door someone'd forgotten to lock.  Luckily, these doors tend to bounce back open if you slam them too hard, so I got lucky. Heehee. 

Three reasons why I came here: 1) Internet access, 2) hot food, and 3) a piano within walking distance.

Oh.  And air conditioning.  That just may have had something to do with it! :D

So, yes.  I'm gonna try heading home shortly, but if there's no power there I'll be cut off the internet until tomorrow.  *grumbles*  This is annoying.

At least I had my little super-powered LED flashlight.  It always comes in handy! *beams*

Alas, my laptop only has about nine minutes of battery power when totally charged (and it takes three of those minutes to boot up).  However, I managed to transfer a couple of 7th Doctor Big Finish audios to my iPod before running out of batteries (the smart thing to do would've been to just bring my laptop with me to work and charge it up here, which is obviously why I didn't think of it until now), so I've been listening to a couple of the Doctor/Ace/Hex episodes while basking in the air conditioned wonderfulness.  I really like Hex.  I think they've done a lot of things with him as a nurse that they could've gone into more with Martha being a med student.  But my rant on missed opportunities for character development can wait for another day.

I enjoyed "Live 34" about a thousand times more than I expected to!  (See, I'm a sucker for gimmicky audios but didn't really feel the love for "Flip-Flop", so wasn't expecting much of this one.)  It was all very exciting, and even the secondary characters were interesting (though I've gotta feel sorry for the guy who played the main newscaster, seeing as how he had about 80% of the lines in the whole two-hour drama).  I think my favourite bit, though, was the random static and channel-flipping in place of the theme music.  I actually get chills when I hear the "beep beep beep booooop" at the top of each hour - comes of spending hours and hours "helping" Dad with his shortwave set when I was a kid.  So, yes.  Much nostalgic goodness.

...now I really do feel silly for not having brought my laptop with me.  At least I could've grabbed the external hard drive!  I want to go home and listen to more audios and maybe study a bit for my music exam (which involves a convoluted word document on my sleeping hard drive).

Of course, I also want to go home and not have to triage the fridge and find out how much food I've lost today.  *groans*  At least yesterday I had the presence of mind to get rid of the wonky cilantro in the vegetable drawer.  And the suspicious bagel.  But I had a whole pack of fish sticks, and another unopened box of chicken fingers in the freezer - hopefully nobody was silly enough to open the freezer while I was gone.  *winces*

Can we just cut out the heat for a while?  Please?  I feel like I haven't had a good night's sleep all summer!  (Of course, given temperature the last few days I'm about ready to announce my "Pants Optional" approach to clothing, so I wouldn't put much stock in my sanity just at the moment.)

Forecast predicts nicer weather beginning tomorrow, with highs dipping back below 30 Celsius (all the way to 24!) and overnight lows falling below 18 (I think they're saying 9, which sounds wonderful). 

Enough stalling; I'm gonna look for an inexpensive restaurant that's open on a Sunday evening (a rarity given the short-staffedness of every place under the sun lately) and then head home to face the doom of my poor little yoghurts.

POWAH! POWAH, I SAY!

Okay, yes.  We've got power back here, which is excellent, and nobody opened the freezer, which is still more excellent because that means I can have fish for supper (all the cafes and pubs I passed on the way home from work were closed, so it's a lucky thing). :D

Alas, another storm's on its way, and they're being a bit too hesitant in extending that tornado watch right into the city, considering the amount of storm I can see from my window.  Mammatus clouds all over the place, which doesn't actually mean much apart from, y'know, thunderstorm, but given the size of the anvil and the hook echo I can see even on the lowest-resolution radar, this is gonna be a heckuva storm.  And since it's not gonna cut into my sleep-time and since it should actually cool things off tonight, I'm all for it. *grins*

Okay.  Food.  Yes.

Oh, the weather outsiiiide is... actually rather nice!

So the storm just passed on by without so much as a flicker of lightning.  What I said earlier, about extending the tornado watch?  Cancel that.  Heehee.

Feeling much better now I've got power and fish and things.  Huzzah!

Anyway, here are a few pictures I've snagged of the clouds around here lately, from my bedroom, because I'm just a geek that way.  They're terrible quality, and here's why: my options are either to snap photos through my screen (in which case, of course, the camera locks onto the grid no matter how many times I tell it to "landscape"), or through my dirty window.  So, um, yes.  Not Photoshopped or GIMPed or anything, because that'd be way too much work. :D

( It's a thunderstorm picspam!  )

And now to read "Camera Obscura", which I'd totally forgotten was by Lloyd Rose! :D