The room was a bit chilly, in spite of the roaring fire in the kitchen, but the waterbed was warm, soft, and comfortable. The person half buried under the large, colorful comforter was oblivious to … everything! … but what was in front of her …

The Animal Crossing game was becoming the center of attraction … on a more and more frequent basis. That sudden realization caused the woman to temporarily lose touch with the game as she let her eyes glaze over and worried yet again that she wasn’t spending as much time on her computer interests anymore. But … if she were to start spending her free time on the computer again, what should she work on? Her favorite AardwolfMUD character, the mud building and coding she wanted to do (but was always a bit nervous about starting), the blogging she’d been promising to do f.o.r.e.v.e.r … ??? …

… but then again, there was also that yummy bread she could be baking … or maybe even a pie … or the crocheting on that lovely afghan for the grand-baby which had become such a looooong project …

The inner peace and quiet she had been experiencing vanished like a cherry pie at a pot luck as each of the “would-be-projects” began vying for 1^st place in the “Ohhhh! That sounds like fun! Let’s do THAT one!” category.

And so, she wondered … let’s narrow it down – which one of those really was the most important task to tackle?

Just then, trying to escape from the tumult of guilt trips careening through her head, she took refuge in the first sensations that penetrated her consciousness …

… they were warm … and soft … and made quiet whuffling sounds …

The woman lifted the DSi and peered underneath it to get a glimpse of the source of those sensations and sounds. It was laying on her tummy – a tiny little beagle, soft brown eyes at half mast, and looking so trusting and loving that she simply couldn’t break her gaze away from the heart squeezing tableau. Without thinking, she closed the DSi, and set it aside. For the first time, she became aware of how heavy and warm the sleepy little bundle felt, and as she ran her fingers through the soft warm fur of the drowsy little puppy, she slowly became aware that the cold air was tracing wet trickles down both of her cheeks.

Just at that moment, the cacophony filling her head dropped to less than a whisper, and her question was answered in one simple thought which came with marvelous clarity and cogency:

On Thursday night, I brought my laptop into the kitchen, and sat in front of the wood stove to stay warm. So far, my usual Thursday night routine had gone along smoothly. I was having a nice evening chat with Small Town Doc … harassing him in between patients, enjoying the teasing camaraderie we share. At the stroke of 11 PM, I plugged my headphones into my laptop, and prepared to call Hans Engel, another Thursday night ritual. When it’s 11 PM on the east coast, it’s 8 PM on the west coast. Thursday is one of the days that Hans doesn’t have dialysis, and I know that I won’t interrupt his supper by calling at that time.

It was a nice, cozy evening. I was feeling nice and toasty in front of the warm stove, and I was starting to settle in for a peaceful relaxed chat with two of my dearest friends. I could hear the “tick tingle” of the freezing rain hitting the window panes, but it didn’t worry me; for the moment, I was warm, and content to be with my friends.

Just as I brought up my Skype program to click on Hans’ phone number, the power blinked … twice, three times … and the internet vanished. Dougie checked to see what the problem was, and discovered that the blinking power had crashed the modem. He rebooted, and I finally made my call to Hans.

As he and I happily chatted, I began to hear what sounded like explosions nearby. I text messaged STDoc and Dougie – telling them what I thought I was hearing. Who would be out in the woods shooting off a deep, booming shotgun at 11 PM at night in the middle of an ice storm?!

Okay … so maybe I was too warm and comfy, and it was making me a bit, ummm, slow … but I still managed to have a wonderful chat with Hans. After disconnecting from the call, I went back into the bedroom with my laptop, and wished STDoc a peaceful and quiet day at work … he’s been known to be a bit overzealous in his work *cough*.

I lay down and tried to sleep, knowing that Friday was going to be a very busy day. I had no less than 3 doctor’s appointments, in 3 different towns, and I was a bit concerned about the slippery roads; I wanted to wake up early enough to be at my best before I had to tackle the tricky driving.

As I was dozing off, I heard my oldest son, Darian, come into the house and tell Dougie that the “Guinea Road” was on fire. Nosy Moofie couldn’t pass that up … remembering the explosions, I got out of bed to find out what was happening. Apparently, the ice storm was getting pretty bad – a road adjacent to ours had a pretty good fire started. The power transformers were exploding and burning, setting fire to the tree limbs around them. At the same time, the weight of the ice was breaking other limbs, and they were falling onto the power lines, dropping live wires onto the freezing road.

I headed back to bed feeling a bit concerned. It was just before midnight, and we still had power …

At 3:30 AM, Doug woke up at his usual time … he usually leaves home at 4:30 AM to get to work by 5:30. This time, he woke me up, and told me that he wasn’t going to try to get to work. We had lost power by then, and he was relatively certain that the outages were widespread. I wondered how he knew that as I dozed back off … and although I never did find out how that knowledge was transmitted to him even before he got out of bed, I did find out that he was right. More than right, in fact …

… Daylight revealed the most surreal crystalline wasteland I’ve seen in more than a decade. There were safety cones in front of our home, blocking our driveway … the power lines were laying in the road. We had no phone, no electricity, no internet (ACK!) … no running water.

I looked out of the window, groaned loudly, and went back to sleep. I knew I wouldn’t be making my 10:30 AM appointment in Exeter. We’d had a hard time landing that one, too. Ah well … Mother Nature really could care less …

By late morning, it became obvious that no one was going anyplace – for a good while. Over a battery powered radio, we discovered that more than 1,000,000 people in Maine and New Hampshire were without power. The list of cancellations went on … and on … and on. The word was that power would most likely not be fully restored for as long as a week.

People were encouraged to try to get to a local shelter … all at the same time as they were told to stay home and not try to navigate the 1/2″ of ice covering all of the streets – and everything else in sight.

Perverse individual that I am, I relaxed into the experience. For us, the power outage would simply be an inconvenience. We have no heat other than the wood stove, and that wasn’t affected by the storm … we would be no colder than usual. We ran the farm’s tractor and generator long enough to fill all of our liquid containers with water, and we were pretty much all set. We did our best to stay warm, and if the complaints we were hearing on the radio were any sign, we were more comfortable than most everyone else. Going on four years of experience … … … for us, it was a lot like just more of the same.

On Saturday, Dougie made some chili from scratch, and cooked it on the wood stove. The smell was enough to drive us over the edge all day … but at suppertime, we were rewarded for our patience with some of the best chili we’d ever had.

Sunday morning, the temperatures had gone down into the low teens (about -11.11C) and even the oil for the oil lamps had frozen. We spent the day relaxing in front of the wood stove, chatting, and napping. I was starting to get used to the quiet … ;o)

Sunday night, Dougie and I put a blanket and some pillows down on the kitchen floor, in front of the wood stove. We lay on the floor and watched about 5 episodes of Heroes on the Nintendo DS … until we couldn’t keep our eyes open anymore.

Monday … started out very quiet. I was wishing for a nice hot shower … but I was still quite happy to run around in my sweat suit, housecoat, and blanket, and a baaaaad bed head.

The power was restored at 3:30 PM on Monday. I was glad for the lights … for the running water … and especially for the internet ( YES! ) … but a small part of me left bad that we would be leaving the quiet down time behind.

Amazingly, as far as I know, we’ve had only 2 local deaths due to the ice storm. One fellow died of carbon monoxide poisoning when he brought a generator into his house, and another fellow, an elderly man who needed oxygen, passed away. The radios warned people to take those in such precarious medical conditions to a shelter … apparently this fellow didn’t go.

Below are some of the photos that Dougie took on Saturday. He did a great job …. and I wanted to share them with you.

I will be posting again soon, picking up from where I left off on the last post. The problem is that quite a few things have happened since then … and I’m going to have to back up quite a bit to give you the entire picture.

And now … until the next time, be well, my dear blog friends.

Yesterday was an eventful day for me. I followed through on some life altering decisions which I will blog about in the next few days, met neighbors we’ve had for more than a decade, and lost our electrical power for more than 16 hours …

At about supper time, a storm blew in from the northwest, and raised some serious havoc over a rather wide radius. Trees came down all over, people died in lightning strikes, some homes caught fire when they were hit, some streets in Portsmouth accumulated water so fast that cars had to be abandoned. What an evening! We lost our power at the height of the storm, which was at about 6 PM last night, and it came back on at about 10 AM.

We were lucky. We didn’t lose anything, and although the plants in the garden were turned upside down, they all look as if they will survive.

Once the storm was over, Dougie and I took a walk down the road to where a pine tree had come down across the power lines. We took some photos, which I’ve included below. On the way home, some of our neighbors were just coming out onto the street to see what was going on. Herbie and Rita have been neighbors as long as I’ve been here, and he is Doug’s cousin. He’s been through a really terrible time medically for the last 2 years, including a trach, 14 mos on TNP, etc. I’m not clear on how it started exactly, but it initially had something to do with the absolute upper part of his spine. I tried hard to get some names from them … but no one apparently remembered any.

I hadn’t seen Herbie and Rita since before he became ill 2 years ago, and we enjoyed visiting each other. As we were talking, another couple came toward us from down the road … wanting to see what had happened. They introduced themselves as my closest neighbors. None of us had met them before. They’ve been in the house across the street since 1997. The conversation picked up steam, and became even more engaging with the extra input.

While we were all still talking, another couple approached from the same general direction. They are people who live only a few houses away. They bought the land from my Father-in-law, and built in one of the nicest spots available quite a number of years ago. They were very nice, and I was absolutely delighted to meet them.

Eventually, the sun began to set, and the mosquitoes drove each of us back in our separate directions … a little poorer from having had to break things up, but a lot richer from finally all meeting one another.

Here in the Maine countryside … and not just here, really, but in much of New England, people generally keep to themselves, because they don’t want to intrude and be seen as “busy bodies.” Also because we all treasure our privacy. However, if something goes wrong and one of us should need some help that others become aware of, everyone would pull together.

But still, even as I write this, I’m a little horrified on the inside as I realize that I never met the lovely couple who live right across the street from us until they’d been there for 11 years!

It took a power outage and a bit of excitement down the road to draw us all from our computers and televisions … out into the street … to meet the people we’ve been rubbing elbows with for better than a decade.

Is globalized communication shrinking our face-to-face world, causing us to become enclosed in the prisons of our homes? We can make friends with people clear across the country, develop warm relationships with friends in India and Malaysia … but more and more, we don’t even know the people who live right next door.

Friends, we need some balance, no?

Take time to greet someone near you this week – someone you see all the time, but have never spoken to. Even just a smile will do, if you’re bashful. If you can communicate with me across the country, or across the world, then you can also communicate with the people whose faces have become familiar to you, but whom you don’t know.

Oooookies … *gets off the soap box* … now here are some shots from last night …

A bit of extra reading on the storm:

Somehow, that seems to be the theme, right now. Online communities like ours are waking up to the realization that we’re more than just faceless, often nameless, origins for the words which flow across the medical blogosphere’s monitors. We’ve become 3 dimensional, living, breathing, bleeding … warm friends. There are no ages, no sexes, no races, no cultures … we are all friends who happen to be in different places, but who are coming to know each other as well, if not better, than those we rub elbows with on a daily basis.

In Rob’s post yesterday, he alluded to the diversity of his online friends: “I have friends who are from all over the country – even all around the world. I have Hindu, Jewish, Atheist, and Agnostic friends, where I would have never had such an opportunity to get close to people across so many faiths [...]” Rob is right. Not only have we found diversity in our friendships, those friendships have developed real depth. Here, in our little corner of the blogosphere, we’ve done what the world needs to do if it wants to survive: we’ve built deep friendships irrespective of culture, race, or religion. Our differences have only been a source of wonder and enlightenment … and have expanded us beyond who we were before we stretched ourselves enough to become one thing only: good friends.

Now, I would like to think that we’re exceptional … in fact, in many ways, I do think so … but it appears as if this is a real movement which is picking up momentum as begins to span the world …

This morning, my son sent me a link to an article on SlashDot … “Over-50s Invade the Social Networking Scene“. I laughed when I read it, and quickly chased down and read the full article: “Face it – oldies want chums, too“. It made think … there’s more to all of this than meets the eye …

It’s not just an unprecedented amount of older people making a rush into Facebook … it’s people of all ages making a rush into friendship. Getting to know people … where nothing matters but who you are – not your looks, not your sex, not your age … simply who you are, and how you give yourself to your friends.

I have a sweet friend that I met in the spring of 2006. I’m sure a lot of you remember him: Dr. Hans Engel. He has the In a Doc’s Mind blog. We were in the process of developing a warm, wonderful friendship, when he had a catastrophic stroke just over a year ago. It damaged his reading and writing abilities, and since that’s how we were communicating, I was afraid that we would lose each other. But we haven’t. Our friendship continued to grow, and now we talk several times a week. We’re improbable friends … but oh, how we enjoy our little chats, and each other!

That’s an example of what these friendships are. They don’t end at the keyboard – although some of us haven’t explored them beyond that point, yet.

We’re living in an age when we no longer know our next door neighbors … we have no clue of who lives down the road … or a half dozen doors away. We’re all pressed together like canned sardines on elevators, in restaurants, checkout lines, church and temple benches … but we no longer know one another. The more tightly pressed down we are with the teeming masses in our daily walk, the lonelier we seem to become. The internet, the blogosphere, has provided a way for us to rebel against the aloneness … and here, we find that our hearts are not as solitary, and some of our deepest thoughts, loves, fears … can be shared in this little haven of ours.

Here, it’s not our bodies doing the talking … it’s our souls.

FaceBook Question #1:

Do you think that as years pass and technology advances, that we’re heading inexorably toward a homogenized electronic social experience which blends reality with fantasy?

Enrico Cantu:

Peggikaye Eagler:

Rob Lamberts:

Pattie Iannitti:

Clay Jones:

Arunn Narasimhan:

Vijay Sadasivam:

My thoughts:

Your turn … :o)