Irene: Three Days without Power, One and Half Weeks sans Internet

 

So I know you can't see anything in this picture. I took it during the storm, but because I'm not adventurous and I don't like waiting for the eye of the storm and then walking out to take pictures only to have my trailer blown over behind me, this picture shows absolutely nothing. 

It's probably fitting really. The storm itself - no biggie. A lot of wind, a little rain. It was the aftermath. The eastside of Providence has a ton of enormous trees - like so enormous that when semis wobble through, their tops scrape whole sections of tree. All of these enormous trees meant that as soon as even the slightest wind came whistling through, all of the powerlines were tangled with loose limbs. The storm started on Sunday morning, and I woke up at 9 am to a blank clock face. That was actually the most bizarre and disorienting thing - as if there just wasn't any time anymore. 

The power stayed off all Sunday and all Monday, but Tuesday morning, when I walked outside to go to work, there were two firetrucks flanking my front door. When I put something in my trashcan, a firefighter leaned out of his window and said, "You might not want to stand under that."

I was standing beneath one of those ubiquitous branch-and-powerline combos. First time I had even noticed it. 

So the power came back on after three days, but then it was the end of August and the end of our internet service. I have been dying a little bit every day since.

BUT it's back, so now I have to stuff in some pictures of things I did. Like... 

The Rhode Island School of Design has like a 6 floor museum with a real range of stuff, and I went last Sunday because they had a pay-what-you-want morning. You really aren't supposed to take pictures, but when I saw the Alexander McQueen Butterfly dress from his 2008 collection, well, somehow I thought you'd just appreciate it too much for me not to include it. Anyway, there were a ton of things there that we studied in that art history class: a Sol LeWitt white box structure, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Rothko, Andy Warhol, a post-Cindy Sherman light painting thing... 

This was the same weekend that I went to a farmer's market (and later I went to a grocery store, but that's less interesting). I neglected to take a picture of the market (very small, very depressing) itself, but I did document the bounty:

This includes a cabbage, 4 eggplants, 3 bell peppers, 5 ears of corn, 4 plums, 2 peaches, 1 tomato, 2 cloves of garlic, a bundle of green beans, a bundle of basil, and a bag of squash type things which I decided I didn't really like. 

I went a little crazy.

So yeah, no really interesting stories here. I just felt like I needed to show something for all the time I spent pretending to read and really just surfing my phone for recipes.