Sinkholes and the looming power outage

 

The last thing I remember, as I try to work my way backward into a dream I was having, in which Uncle Steve was present, was the sudden appearance of two giant sinkholes in my backyard. 

Steve and I were wiping our butts and tossing the toilet paper into a cardboard box when I commented, "This is the part of the job I don't like. This would represent the end." 

I have no idea what job we were doing, only that there was an empty cardboard box, presumably from some kind of product we were assembling. 

Steve gave me that look, like, "Yeah, whatever, kid. Cute, you think you've arrived at the point where you can make commentary. Almost makes me smile. Almost." He smiled an almost smile as he silently judged my remark. At that point I looked out my back door.

"Holy Shit!" I exclaimed as I noticed a giant sinkhole, about six foot in diameter. 

It was only about three feet deep and perfectly round. Might make a nice wading pool if it didn't keep getting deeper, I thought to myself as I looked around the backyard. 

"Holy shit, again?!" I screamed as I saw a second, larger sinkhole. This one was twelve feet around and similarly symmetrical, a nice little swimming hole. 

I was impressed by their placement and precision. They hadn't disturbed any structures or other landscaping. It was like they'd been purposefully placed. Their sudden appearance was upsetting, but I was already working myself into putting a positive spin on being the proud owner of two rather well-formed natural anomalies. I could still put the gazebo over there...

That's all that's coming to me. The sinkholes jarred me awake with their sudden appearance, so they robbed me of whatever storyline preceded their arrival. 

Oh, well. I got a lot more pickin' to do today. Then PG&FuckingE promises to shut everyone's power off for the next two days due to imminent wind conditions and a red flag warning of fire danger. 

I am almost out of groceries, but I am going to wait until this event is over before I go to the store. I don't want to spend the money on food that's just going to go bad. They expect everyone to have a backup generator and be able to just deal with these little outages, but it just ain't that way. Lots of us rely on the electrical grid every moment of the day. This is really gonna put a crimp in my routine.

Fortunately, I've got a few things to do outside during the day that don't require any electricity. In fact, I'd do well to take some time to run my well pump wire through the remaining 220 feet of conduit that I bought. Hurmmmphh! Wasn't looking forward to that. It's a tight squeeze, as I bought the smallest, cheapest conduit available to do the job. Pushing the wire through almost requires two people, as it binds up and requires a lot of cajoling to feed it.