Thursday, October 15, 2009

Blog Action Day '09...and the power goes out!

This morning I slept in accidentally. Well, it wasn't a complete accident. My alarm went off as scheduled at 7:30am, and I reached out and hit the snooze button.

Ten minutes later it went off again, and again I hit the snooze button.

Ten minutes later I hit the snooze button again.

Ten minutes later, I opened my eyes a bit more and hit 'dismiss alarm'.

My next cogent thought was looking at my watch and realising it was 10am.

This was a little annoying, but I'd enjoyed the extra sleep.

I started my morning routine. Washing my face and waking up and walked into the study to check my email. It was then that I noticed the quiet and the cold. My laptop was displaying an alert that it was on low battery and there were no lights on the modem.

The power was out. This was annoying, I had things I needed to do that required the use of power.

And then I remembered. I had received a letter about this power cut weeks ago. I found the letter and read that "power will be cut between 8:15am and 3:15pm on Thursday the 15th of October".

I had known that the power was going to be cut....but had forgotten.

If only I had gotten up earlier I could have made breakfast. If only I had gotten up earlier I could have checked my email and gotten some work done.

But I had ignored the repeated alarm. I had not only 'snoozed' I had 'dismissed the alarm'. Because of this the heater had not kicked in, the appliances were not functional and the lights didn't work.

Because I had not listened to the alarm and had not paid attention to the advice from the power company I was left cold, hungry and in the dark.

One of the things I had planned to do on my computer this morning was write this blog post. Because today is Blog Action Day '09.

And the topic is climate change.

Something that we have been warned about, well in advance. We have had alarms going off for ages, but there is always the temptation to hit 'snooze' or 'dismiss' to the alarms that are telling us to wake up and do something before its too late.

Before we are left hungry, in darkness and at the mercy of the weather.

The power going out on a day I was going to write about climate change...how ironic.

And profound.