No longer nilpotent

Excuse me for stealing and mishandling a team from abstract algebra (though "nilpotent" does literally mean "powerless").

I came back home just after 5pm today and noticed while walking along Del Mar that there was a police car with flashing lights at the corner of Del Mar and El Molino. I turned out my block on El Molino and noticed that none of the street lights were on. I thought maybe it was a bit too early for them to go on, but then I also noticed that none of the lights in my apartment bullding were on and that, in fact, the power was down on the entire block. (Then I rushed right back to the office from whence I came because I needed to make a phone call.) After dinner (because I needed to find places other than home to be), I walked along Cordova and noticed that some places along Cordova near Lake (that would normally be open) also were without power. (For example, Hana Grill had their doors open but no lights.) There was a weird alternating between streets with power and those without. (Hudson didn't have power, Oak Knoll did, and the right side of El Molino did not. Lots of street lights (including those on both sides of my block of El Molino) were down, as were lots of traffic lights. (I hadn't noticed the traffic light thing before -- probably because of the flashing police car -- but of course that was why the police were there.) While walking back just before 8pm, the police were no longer there but manual stop signs had been placed on all the relevant streets. So I went to Coffee Bean and then to the office, from which I called home. (Basically, I'd know that power returned if my answering machine picked up because the phone with that needs to be plugged in to work.) Based on the timing of the clocks when I came back home, power returned at something like 9:40 pm or so. I don't know when I lost power originally, but 5 hours without power is pretty much the lower bound and there were at least several (non-contiguous) blocks without power. Hell, at about 6pm I called the Pasadena Dept of Water and Power, chose to 'report' a blackout (though I was really planning on asking for an ETA because I knew they knew about it), and was syphoned off to a message that indicated that service was temporarily out because everybody was out dealing with a major power outage.

One of the things I had thought about doing while home if this persisted was using a flashlight and reading. I decided not to in part because the same battery had been in the flashlight for a while and I didn't know how much juice was left (and partly because that's a pain in the ass in general). Ironically, the story I would have read is the H. P. Lovecraft story that I started reading this morning at Peet's. Certainly, that's one of the right authors to read in this situation.

Anyway, I'll be doing one more blog entry, finishing the story, and playing some Civ IV.