Plunged into darkness!
Real candle plus fake candle.
Gosh, thought I, I have a great idea. I’ll clean my office!
It was starting to get sort of random, with books and papers in places that books and papers should not be hanging out, largely because those particular books and papers have not been assigned proper homes, so they are loitering in random corners, muttering to each other, and generally wasting their time.  I knew that if I didn’t take care of them, they’d soon be pitching pennies, sassing passers-by and smoking cigarettes.
No one wants to see books and papers go bad. Get this in hand before it’s too late!
Fortunately I had a couple of hours free before settling down to my night’s work. And what better day to do it? I would come back on New Year’s Day with my office already in order, and be ready to attack my work with vigor and alacrity, with nothing else hanging over my head, and only pleasing vistas and comfort all around.
Also, I could make some tea. My fave Lapsang Souchong, which I haven’t had lately, as I’ve been trying to do more green tea instead. Also, hey! Susan Forbes Hansen’s show, Sunday Night Folk Festival, on the radio — I can’t tune it in, because we’re in sort of a reception sinkhole, but live streaming on the computer works just fine! Just the thing to keep me entertained while sorting and cleaning.
Excellent plan.
Step one: take all those recalcitrant books and papers, and put them out into stacks in the corridor. Done.
Step two: take every object off every surface and put them in corridor, too, so I can dust every surface. Done.
Step three: What’s that beeping noise?
And why is it so dark?
The beeping noise my computer’s emergency UPS, doing its job and keeping that computer running so I could save any files and shut it down properly.  Because we suddenly had no power.
It took some doing to find out that it was only this office/business/warehouse complex that had no power, and that the rest of the town was fine. I had to climb on the roof, to look around.
But this is very a big old collection of former mills and factories, and it wasn’t just my building. The whole vast thing was dark. Nothing here had power.
I saw a police car cruising along, doing a full circle of the whole complex, which was reassuring. Probably an emergency alarm went off because of the power being out. Glad they were on the job.
But I had no electricity.
There were emergency floodlights in the stairwells, where they were doing me no good at all — all my stuff, as you may recall, being now out in the corridor.  In the dark.
So I contemplated my situation, found it inexpressibly amusing, threw up my hands, turned on the flashlight function on my phone, and hauled it all back into my office. I couldn’t listen to Sunday Night Folk Festival while I worked, so I whistled some tunes instead.
I put my tea in a thermos, and then threw everything out of the mini-fridge that I thought might go bad in three days — because, hey, with New Year’s Eve tomorrow, and New Year’s Day the next day, who the heck would be working to fix this? Could I even try to contact the building owners? The management office was certainly closed, but would they even check their messages until after the holiday?
With that all settled, I gathered my laptop, some books, the tea, the trash, and hauled it all down to my car, and headed out. Plans gang agly, as the poet says.
But… just in case, I thought I’d circumnavigate the whole complex.
And around the back, I came across these guys:
“Ah,” I said to the dudes at work, “this explains it!”
“What, didn’t anyone tell you?” they asked.
“Tell me… what?”
This had been planned for months. They could not believe that no one had bothered to tell me about it! They were making repairs, had to turn off the power to do it, all scheduled ahead of time! How could I not have been told?
Well. I believe they assumed I was an employee of some business there, and that my bosses would have been told, and they ought to have told me. I didn’t correct them, and allowed them to be outraged on my behalf, which I feel was very kind of them.
But in fact, it’s pretty easy for the building owners to forget that I exist, and that I work on the weekends. And that Sunday night 9PM, just before a major holiday would be a time and day that I would be in my office, at work, in need of electricity.
With a bit of trepidation, I asked the dudes how long the repairs would take — would they be done, say, by Wednesday?
The were amused. “Five AM tomorrow.”
So, all is well after all. I’ll pop back tomorrow and take care of everything. I’ll probably see the turn of the year at my desk, in my office, watching the countdown and toasting with some Laphraoig.
Meanwhile, tonight I’ve set up here in my kitchen, and am about to have some popcorn and watch Bandersnatch on Netflix to see if it’s as fun as I’ve been hearing.
Tea, fleurs, laptop
I sure hope 2019 is an improvement on 2018, because damn.
However, I have to say 2018 is ending rather well because — remember that Tor.com mention by James Davis Nicoll?
Well, I got a nice bump in my sales as a result. A very nice bump.  I won’t get the royalties until the end of February, but this is by far my best sales month in years. I’ve sold, well, let me check… yep. As of now, just over 500 books this month.
So, that’s a nice way to end the year!
Possibly your year is ending as positively as mine is! And possibly, though we might not actually believe in omens, we can pretend to, and view it all as a good omen for the possibilities of 2019.
Yeah, let’s do that.
