An urgent telephone call woke me from my slumber at 8:30 this morning. Doc Brown wanted me to pick up the videocamera from his lab before heading to Twin Pines Mall to document his latest experiment. He kept saying that “this is the big one! The one I’ve been waiting for all my life!,” but I have my doubts.

Actually, the reason for the phone call was that LaserFiche, the document imaging software I stare at all day at work, wasn’t working. This resulted in mass hysteria and a complete inability to accomplish any work (surprise, surprise).

What was wrong? I’m not sure that it was anything that big; the server just needed a reboot to the head.

The bright side of being called into work was that I actually worked most of the day, and so I’m now actually current on one of my responsibilities. Tomorrow I’ll probably catch up on another of my responsibilities. I’ve never been current at work, so this is new territory for me.

On the anime front: I like Full Metal Panic. It’s not just because the show is nice to look at (Kurumi doesn’t look too bad, either, but did nothing for me), and the plot hasn’t really kicked in yet…so it must be that I just like the characters.

[Two hours later] Wow. I guess my neighborhood pissed off Pacific Power, ’cause we just lost electricity something fierce. I, like Brian, save my work fairly regularly, so the above entry was almost completely intact despite my sudden plunge into darkness. I was also chatting with Brian on IM at the time; I’m sure he now believes me dead, since I never came back online. (Thanks to his prodding, though, I finally ran spell-check on my blog…the results were such that I’ll be running spell check every time before I post. Ouch!) Though I might have been able to jury-rig an internet connection using my powerbook and a dial-up connection (if I knew what phone number Comcast uses), I had no great need to connect to the internet during the blackout. I’m not addicted to it or anything. I can stop whenever I want.

The lack of juice did cramp my plan to watch the fourth episode of Full Metal Panic tonight, however. Poor me; my DVDs are reduced to frisbees when there isn’t any electricity.

As it was a pleasant evening outside, and the moon was (we decided) 7/8 full, my entire family—including the cat—congregated on the back deck and chatted. In the distance we heard the screams of young girls, twice. Just as in a horror movie, we never heard them scream again. A bit later we heard a male psychopath’s laugh (sounding quite a bit like that of Jinnai, from El Hazard). I laughed equally loudly when I heard that laugh, so everybody else must suspect there are two loony people around them. If they only knew.

My neighbors up the street unwittingly became involved in a technology race with my family; they were the first to employ the use of fire, but we beat them cleanly to flashlights (and, therefore, electricity). To show up the cocky bastards, once and for all, we demonstrated our propane heating technology by firing up the barbecue—just because we could.

I should have made some toast while we were at it.

After the neighbors unconditionally surrendered […no, we didn’t really light the grill], I began my own personal STI project. What is STI, you ask? The Search for Terrestrial Intelligence, of course. I was only armed with a Maglite, which hampered my ability to send messages effectively…despite the paucity of equipment, I repeatedly flashed out into the darkness. I grew hopeful once or twice, when there were what seemed to be flashes back…but they never responded a second time, which leads me to believe it was entirely coincidence. No communication actually took place. STI was a complete failure.

Those SETI guys have it rough.