Our township was without electricity for almost 24 hours. Not a record here. One of the longest was three days in December 2022. That event occurred during a massive winter storm called the Blue Blizzard. It buried huge swathes of the state and our neighboring states with two feet or more of snow mixed with freezing rain. I am working on a post about that, discussing the ecological consequences resulting from massive forest destruction brought by the storm.

The recent power outage was attributed to a rodent, but no explanation was given as to how it did that. Did it get inside a transformer? Short out exposed wires by falling on them? Whatever it did caused a fire in the substation, destroying transformers.

There have been problems with that substation all summer. In the last two weeks, before this blackout, there had been three other power surges followed by short power interruptions. Power surges and brief interruptions have been happening all summer. I haven’t heard why any of those happened. They weren’t big enough to get anyone’s attention, I guess.

So for now we have electricity.

My computer came back to life, too. Why? I don’t know. But it did. It seems to have suffered no ill effects, and all files look good. I’ll get it checked anyway. In the meantime, I can get back to writing and editing new posts and reading yours comfortably on a large screen.