My Infinite Improbability

I've been living alone in my apartment for close to 9 months.
My biggest -- and really only -- fear of living alone was that my Inner Voice, coupled with the freedom of loneliness (yes that makes sense) would release me from restraints and I'd go off the deep end/do something crazy/get into trouble...

But the professional responsibilities of my job ground me to normalcy -- I can't, for example, dye my hair blue like I've always wanted.
Going over to my parents' house about once a week also grounds me. I consider it one of my highest priorities to live up to the high standards with which they raised me, and never cause them shame from me. That is a son's responsibility.
And talking and hanging out with my sis & bro-in-law frequently also gives me a normalcy perspective. So does talking frequently with Steve, be it via Skype while playing Starcraft II or in WoW.

However, in my next life, I'm going to be a digital artist. Stay up all night creating art. Slaving over the need to create. Blue hair (prob streaks at first), micro magnet in a fingertip, crazy awesome ideas. Freedom of expression and all that jazz. I've had a taste of all this separately in the past, but not combined into one life.
I know that if I had never moved to MD from NY when I was a teen, that this is the path I would have been on... straight to Greenwich Village man. For better or for worst... who knows?

Power Outage - Adventures in Apartment Living

When I drove home after work (all 5 min of it) and got on to Reisterstown Road I noticed a streetlight was out and there were cops cars at the intersection. That is odd, but then I saw more cop cars along the road and BGE trucks... Uh oh.

I pulled up to my parking lot and at the end of it there are two service trucks connecting a generator-looking device to the huge switch box over there. (10pm now and it's still there).
I noticed fewer than normal cars parked for 6:15pm on a Wednesday...

I walked up to my building's front door and there was a pink piece of 8.5x11 paper taped to the glass door, circa 5pm. It stated that the power is out and BGE roughly estimates that it will be fixed by 6pm. I groaned audibly because... it was already about 6:15.

I was planning on cooking chicken for dinner, something spicy with cheese on a bed of nachos, and watching last night's episode of Warehouse 13. There goes those plans! Instead I grabbed my iPad and blasted to Panera. I really enjoy 1 sandwich there, which is filling, a full meal; it had been a while since I'd eaten Panera; and they have free Wi-fi. So I spent a little while there. Found BGE's website and the page showing where power is out and how many affected customers. For Owings Mills it was 1600 people. Ugh. That page auto-updates every 10 min and I saw 2 page refreshes. Left there and went to Office Depot further down the road. Didn't find much.

Drove home, power still out. I have an LED lantern that's a crank-to-charge, but 30 seconds of cranking yields maybe 3-4 min of bright light before it quickly dims out. Yes that's a good conversion factor, but still annoying. So I headed to Target (2 min up the road) and called Mom. Good ol' Mom always knows best. She recommended candle types and to get an actual flashlight.
I bought two 8-packs of 1.4" votive candles, an LED flashlight that also has a lantern mode (100+ hours on 1 set of 4 AAs), and a neat LED "glowstick"/flashlight (200 hrs on its watch size batteries).

Got home, 9:15-ish, power still out. Even fewer cars in the lot now. Saw a mom-dad-kid family get into their car and leave. Wonder if they're planning on spending the night at someone else's? Adam is just up the road from me and he has power. Honestly it's a little creepy at how dark and how quiet it is, except for the night bugs like crickets chirping. And that no one's around...

Got in and grabbed my flat metal baking sheet and wrapped it with aluminum foil, set it on my coffee table then lit one 8-pack of votive candles, along with the one largish vanilla-smelling candle I already had. This provided good light in my living room. But after 30 min I noticed the temperature getting warmer near my couch area. My thermostat reads 76, and to me that's noticeably warm as I like it to be 70 or so, 68 even sometimes.
The flashlight-lantern is quite bright so I blew out the candles and just have that on my coffee table. There's not much breeze but it's going down to 60 degrees tonight so that should keep me cool.

It's 10:30pm now and still no power.
Obviously I'm writing this on my iPad in Notes so I can upload it to my blog later.
66% battery left on it. I guess I'll listen to mp3s on my Sony Walkman with my new Skullcandy blue Smokin' earbuds before going to sleep early.
Haven't decided if I want to sleep in my bed, warm (not so great air circulation in there), or on my comfy leather couch (comfy yes, but not nearly as much space of course) with the 2 big windows open to stay cool...

Addendum -- power came back on at 1:20am.