Thursday, October 15th, 2020

The power goes out while I’m in the shower. It’s just a blip. The light and the water heater go off then, almost immediately, back on. When I emerge from the bathroom, I see that the digital clock is still correct. The room is too quiet, though. My computer is off. That isn’t good. I have been doing a full backup of a very large hard drive. It was supposed to take a week. I was four days into it. I sit down at the computer and boot it up again. It starts without a problem, as do all the apps that had been running, except for the backup. I start to set that up again. I remember one thing that I had forgotten to do before starting the last one. I was going to move some files from a drive that doesn’t regularly get backed up to the one that does. I set that process up. It will take three hours. OK. Moments after it gets rolling, the power goes out again. This time it doesn’t come back on. I have to get to work. I pull my stuff together and head out. My landlady is at the top of the stairs. I tell her, in Hebrew, that there is no electricity. She answers in English. “Yes, the electric company is working.” That tends to take all day. I leave everything as it is. I see more people and hear more voices than usual. The weather is relatively cool. The temperature hasn’t gone above 90 degrees Fahrenheit for a couple of days. People are walking their dogs and sitting in their yards. A city worker is sweeping up fallen purple petals from a jacaranda along the pedestrian street. More grapefruit and oranges have dropped from the trees. A toddler struggles to walk past me, holding on to his stroller as he stumbles along. When he lets go, he falls in front of me. He looks up at his mother. He didn’t expect that to happen. His mother lifts him off the ground, stands him up, and puts his hand on the bar of the stroller. They continue on. So do I. I hear several air conditioners come back to life. A light in a yard comes on. I wonder how long that will last.