rock and roll

15october2006

an earthquake shook oahu this morning about 7:15. it rocked and rolled the bed i was sleeping in and woke me up. the rumbling lasted about 20-30 seconds, maybe less. it felt like the building i was in kept rocking after the quake, or the quake continued at a lesser rate of quiver for a few seconds after i initialy thought it was over.

finally it stopped and the cat came skulking out from under the bed in a crouching position, unsure of just what had happened.

i flicked the tv to a local channel, but the satellite tv was acting all jumbled up, like it had just been in an earthquake or something. i couldn't get any local channels, so i tried to get cnn or one of the cable channels. i remained still half-asleep with the remote in my hand, trying to tune the tv for a couple of minutes more. then color bars came up on the screen. immediately after that the electricity went dead. everything came to a stop.

and so it remains.

honolulu is in a coma. the entire island of oahu has no electricity for the past six hours now as far as i can tell.

i went back to sleep about 7:45, hoping the power would be on when i woke. but at about 9:00am a security guard from my building knocked on my apartment door and informed me of the island-wide power outage.

so i fed the cat and made some coffee. the coffee was my first non-electric adventure. i realized there were no ground coffee beans, since i normally use whole beans and grind them as needed with an electric grinder. the only useable coffee i had was an old, long-ago opened can of french market coffee that i never used but had around basically for decoration. nevertheless, i used a scoop of that and heated the water on my portable gas stove. i use a french press coffeemaker, so the rest was easy. i drank some of the old, stale coffee. but it's cafe-du-monde, so it was drinkable, and could have been much worse, so i was relatively content. i forced myself to eat a bit of muffin so something besides just old stale coffee would be all i consumed for a while. i could barely eat one bite, must have been nerves.

when the security guard was here he was knocking on people's doors and telling them there had been an earthquake, and to stay in their units. i laughed when he told me this. i'm already a prisoner anyway. no electricity, no elevator, and i live on the sixth floor of a tower.

so now we wait, while all the food in the fridge goes bad.