Electricity, Eee-Lec-Tri-City

This post should be read with the School House Rock! song "Electricity" running through your brain. If you don't know the song, well, I am truly sorry.

We've been having lots of wind storms here in Washington this week. A not-so-pleasant side effect of the wind blowing lots is that our power goes out pretty much all the time. It was out yesterday afternoon through this morning, and I'm speedily typing while I have the chance, as I'm sure it will go out again soon.

We live in a very pro-electricity home. Not only are all of our phones cordless, digital ones that only work when the power is on, but my kids get freaked out and annoyed when the lights don't work, let alone when they can't watch Curious George. Fun times. I left the house yesterday to go shopping with both boys. Yes, that's how desperate I became. Also, our garage door is way too heavy for me to open by myself when the power is out (the previous owners rigged the doors so they are connected so they could use one garage door opener. We call these kind of things "Imper-vations" in their honor) so I have to make sure to park outside so I can leave if I need to. Fortunately, yesterday the power was already out when I got home, so I couldn't get locked in the garage.

Last night, the electricity came on momentarily -- long enough to turn on the battery back-up system Hubby keeps his alarm clock plugged into. The battery back-up has a very annoying high-pitched beep that sounds every 20 seconds. Hubby can't hear it, of course. Only the dogs and me, apparently. So, sometime in the middle of the night, I was crawling around under his side of the bed, poking around for some sort of OFF switch for this infernal contraption. I finally found it, turned the thing off, then worried that Hubby would miss some important meeting this morning. I woke him up to ask him what time he needed to get up so I could set my trusty old battery powered alarm clock for him. "Seven fifteen," he mumbled. I was already going to get up at 7:15, so left my alarm set for its original time.

So, this morning at 7:15, the alarm sounded and I told Hubby it was 7:15. He mumbled, "Thanks," before rolling over and going back to sleep. I finally got up at 7:30 when I figured he wasn't going to get in the shower. When I was scrambling to get the boys out of the house to head to speech therapy at 8:15, guess who was still snoozing? Hmmm. I told him it was 8:15 before I left.

Anyway, last night after turning off the annoying beeping device (why the heck do they make those things so they beep? "Hey everybody! The power's out! Let me wait 20 seconds and I'll beep again so you know the power is still out!") I started thinking about electricity, and how living in the boonies is not a good thing for having constant electricity when you need it. I decided someone somewhere should come up with a generator that runs on fat person treadmill action. That way, the fat person is getting some exercise, and in addition to sweat and burned calories, electricity can be generated as well! Hey, I'm not being weightist, either. Skinny people can use them, too. They should definitely get them at gyms. They could fuel the entire gym, and sell the excess electricity to nearby buildings. So, someone, somewhere, get on it! I'd like one for my house. Of course, I don't want to have to be the generator of electricity, so I guess I'd have to use the dogs or kids to run on the treadmill.

Time to go soak up some more electric lighting before the power goes out again.