DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Dear PG&E Customer:
Pacific Gas and Electric Company is constantly striving to improve products and services for its customers. We are excited to introduce to you our latest improvement.
Beginning this month, the “detail of bill” section of your energy statement will be double-sided. This new format will reduce the amount of paper used for each statement creating a better, more environment- and customer-friendly bill.
…

So, my 2-page electric bill now fits on a single sheet of paper.

Unfortunately, the letter proclaiming this savings was printed on a second sheet.

Most interesting article I’ve seen in the paper in a while:

French horn player Meredith Brown had a busy weekend.

Last Saturday morning, she drove from her home in Vallejo to San Rafael for two back-to-back rehearsals with the Marin Symphony, then played an evening concert in San Jose with the Symphony Silicon Valley. Sunday’s schedule was more grueling: morning rehearsal in Marin, afternoon concert in San Jose, evening concert in Marin.

And you thought your commute was rough.

The headline was have violins, will travel. The story describes the crazy lifestyles of the classical musicians who populate the Bay Area’s part-time orchestras. None of these orchestras employ full-time players, so the musicians have to work with more than one. Sometimes six or eight.

The pay isn’t great. The days are long. The oil changes are frequent. I’m not sure grueling would cover it.

But the players love it. I mean, they’d have to.

While Meredith Brown was putting in the 5000-10000 hours of practice she must have put in to become a professional classical musician, I was writing assembly code to draw Backgammon screens on my C=64 and solving Rubik’s Cube and so on… which leads me to the following analysis of her weekend commute.

Vallejo to San Rafael is 30 miles… San Rafael to San Jose is 65 miles… San Jose to Vallejo is 70 miles. Her weekend total would have been 30+65+70 (saturday) plus 30+65+65+30 (sunday) or 355 miles, assuming she didn’t go home between services. Drive like that 7 days a week for a year, and you’ll put 62000 miles on your car.

When you commute, you pay twice, both in dollars and in hours. My 80-mile drive to the office regularly takes 120-160 minutes. If these musicians ever run into traffic, there’s a good chance they’re spending more time driving than they are playing music.

Anyway, here’s the documentary, already on DVD: Freeway Philharmonic, the classical road warriors. At $25, it will cost you less than Ms. Brown spent on gas last weekend.

PS. I used to work with Bruce Chrisp, who, with his wife Meredith Brown is featured in the SFGate article and the Freeway Philharmonic documentary. If I recall correctly, Bruce retired from a very promising career in web design to pursue music full-time. Knowing what he sacrificed, I’m awed by his dedication.

Update 2008-02-09: Bruce got in touch to announce a new website, Freeway Philharmonic, which names the local musicians and orchestras, announces news and auditions, and more.

52 hours with no light and no running water. 52 hours of early nights, of dirty dishes that can’t be washed, of hauling buckets of rainwater to flush toilets. 52 hours of the walls closing in. 52 hours of sweaty lunchmeats in a dank refrigerator, assaulting the senses of anyone who dares to venture inside.

52 hours of the beer smelling like salami.

We coped with the outage fairly well, and when I say “fairly well,” I’m lying. We depend on electricity to live, and I bet half the population would begin hunting their neighbors for sport within 72 hours if the lights ever went off for good.

Photos from the Great Storm of 2008

Five years ago, we lost power for 75 hours — just over three days with no lights, no heat, no running water. It was miserable, but I was home alone at the time, and I coped reasonably well (as far as you know).

This time it’s worse. We’re only 30 hours in, but we have three extra bodies in the house, including two houseguests and one toddler.

The electric utility hasn’t even given us an estimate of when they might restore service. They haven’t even come out to assess it. PG&E reports 450 separate outages, and ours apparently doesn’t rank high enough to warrant any attention.

I figured out today what the problem is. It’s nothing mysterious or difficult to diagnose — there’s a live electrical wire laying in the street. Some thoughtful neighbors have strung yellow “CAUTION” tape across a couple trash cans to prevent folks from driving over the cable and electrocuting themselves.

Just above are a couple of extremely tall redwoods leaning about 2045° off of vertical. If the tree they’re leaning on gives way, the whole lot will end up on the road, which among other things means I’ll have to walk the last mile home (with 20 lbs of ice and six gallons of water).

Anyway, you have to figure that if PG&E can’t spare a crew to come out and coil up a live wire that’s been laying on a wet street for a day and a half, then the power situation must be pretty bad.

During the last long blackout five years ago, I commented that I’d rather spend money on a solar-electric system than a generator. I’ve done that, and just like last time, sunny skies have returned long before the electricity. But I’ve since learned that grid-tied PV systems don’t work without the grid. So although the system on my roof could easily power us through a houseful of warm showers and overdue loads of laundry, it’s as cold and dark as we are inside. We’ll end up buying a generator anyway.