Winter Storm Shirley

I had a blackout early Monday morning and it lasted until 7:22 AM today. (There were 2 minutes on Monday when it came on but then it went off again, so I didn't have a chance to use it.) What I had was not a "rolling blackout" but a continuous blackout. I also had frozen pipes and only 1 gallon of emergency drinking water. Since I had cans of soda to drink, I figured I would use the emergency water for washing dishes and flushing the toilet. To my relief the toilet had running water again before the bathroom sinks did, so I didn't have to use up all my emergency water. My hand sanitizer pump wouldn't work, so I had to use antibacterial wipes.

I had a hand-crank radio and tried to use it to charge my cellphone, only to discover there was no USB port, but some other kind of very old port for which I had no adapter. So I had to charge the iphone from a laptop computer that still had battery life. But even when I did that, the iphone drained its entire battery within hours. I hadn't done anything but text with my family! So I charged it again and turned it off to preserve what I had.

So then I spent the rest of my time finishing my Scooby Doo game and reading my physical books. I finished the Kate Warne book, and I thought it was pretty good despite some strange typos and the repeated use of "lie" (plural subject, present tense) when surely she meant "lay" (singular subject, past tense). Kate has a colorful history growing up in the circus, and when her parents died, her Uncle Juba, a free black man, sent her to boarding school so she could have a regular domestic life. She started out being a governess, then entered a bad, impulsive marriage, and finally divorced before getting her job with Allan Pinkerton. Her Uncle Juba comes back, along with a former circus horse, and they get to work as detectives. She has a love interest that is not Allan Pinkerton, which I'm glad for, and they do undercover espionage around the Baltimore Plot. Many real life historical people are characters, including Senator Louis Wigfall, and they mention Preston Brooks viciously beating Charles Sumner in the Senate in 1856. I was disappointed that Hattie Lawton and Timothy Webster went off to Maryland and we didn't get to see them do their spying, but they might feature more in the sequel I hope. Once the Civil War starts, the Pinkertons will have to investigate the Confederacy and be the new Secret Service.