Hard to take a good selfie when the power’s out. Also this captured the mood pretty honestly.
I’m writing this in the middle of the third power outage we’ve had at my apartment this year. Because maybe the power will come back as soon as I complain about it.
This particular outage has put into a sharp relief how perilous my particular apartment is when it comes to electricity. Like I said, third time this year the power’s gone out in our area. (And to be fair, it’s not just our apartment. It’s also at least a third of the entire Magnolia neighborhood.) But it’s more than that. It’s that the apartment’s poorly insulated. It’s that it’s entirely reliant on electricity for any heat production. Even the stove is electric, so boiling water for hot water bottles or whatever is out of the question.
The biggest stressor, by far, is the lizards. My little buddies can’t make enough of their own heat to keep themselves warm. And given the insulation situation, even if I spend all day in the bedroom with them, I’m not able to keep their temperatures up on my own. There’s stopgap solutions, like giving them handwarmers to rest on, but I’m learning today those can be hit or miss. Jerry curled up fine against his, but I’m having trouble convincing Jabberwocky to lay on hers, and she doesn’t seem inclined to do so herself. I don’t have a backup power source for their usual heaters, and even if I did, it’d be drained super quickly because space heaters and heat bulbs are not exactly efficient.
It’s a shitty situation without any good solutions that fit where I am right now. It’s making me think I might want to change apartments before the winter next year, and move to a neighborhood that has steadier power. Or, if I’m lucky, a house, where it’d be easier to do things like run a backup generator. Or at least convince my housemates to come have a room party with me to keep the temperature up.
Right now, it’s all theoreticals, of course. Not having a job means I can’t (well, at this very second, shouldn’t) move. I haven’t the foggiest idea of where would actually be practical to go, anyway. But it’s hard when you have to worry about beings other than yourself, and that’s what I’ve spent today doing. My current living situation is reliable enough, environment-wise, for me. It’s not reliable enough for them, and that’s fucked up and stressful. Hopefully sometime soon here I’ll get something figured out.
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