Dear Rocky Mountain Power: WTF?

Well, since I decided to throw out how I handled my New Years, it seems only appropriate to get into how my Christmas went.

Let me give you a little backstory here, I live in a neighborhood with one of the oldest, most pathetic power grids ever. My block, including three or four other residential blocks, and one commerical grid near a relatively busy intersection, can often go from having light and heat, to having absolutely nothing at all. If it runs on electricity, you can bet your ass that it'll be shut down. And it is not uncommon to have these little power outages last for great lengths of time. Sometimes we lose power for a half hour, sometimes we go dark for more than half a day. On one particularly fun summer day, we lost power first thing at nine clear until three in the morning. My neighborhood is in buttfuck central, as far as the electric company is concerned.

Still, we have endured. We kind of have to, it's not like we have any other option really. But we in this particular grid have always comforted ourselves with the notion that these outages, though inconvenient, happen on your average lazy days. The kind of days where the expectation level is low and nothing major is going on.

A day like, oh I don't know, Christmas perhaps?

Imagine this, it's about 2pm on Christmas day, and your kitchen is loaded. You're about forty five minutes into the cooking. Two turkeys have hit the heat, one roasting in the oven, the other in a pot doing a bit of the sous vide action. In a small electrical cooker, a city ham is slow cooking away. You're in basic prep, getting dough ready for rolls, chopping vegetables for potato salads and so forth, and things are going good. Everything is synced to come out at the same time, we have all the ingredients we need, it's all as perfect as you could possibly imagine.

And then, the power goes out.

Now some of you out in the world may have gas ranges, and don't have to worry about this shit. Good for you man, but my shit is all electric, which means when the power goes out the whole bit goes down. We lost everything. No cooking food, no Christmas Story on television, hell there wasn't even any heat to keep the damn house warm.

Now, I know heat can be replaced with good jackets, and televised entertainment can be replaced with simple pleasures like board games and conversation, but what about the food man? My perfectly synced, magnificent eats aren't even an hour into cooking. And since all of our available resources had been pooled to making this meal possible, there wasn't even anything to snack on. Nothing but uncooked veggies, and severely undercooked meat.

"No worries," I thought to myself. "There's plenty of residual heat to keep things going for the time being. Besides, this can't possibly last more than half an hour, it's Christmas for fuck's sake."

Two hours later, the power still hadn't come out, and my optimism was fading.

At this point, I am losing my damn mind. I can already imagine various strains of bacteria setting up shop and having freak sex orgies all over my perfectly cultivated food. And yeah, I suppose once we regain power, if we regain power, that I can just cook all those fuck happy bacteria into nonexistence. But still! I'll have fuck happy bacteria corpses on my food!

And what about moisture? I work damn hard to make sure my turkey doesn't taste like cardboard every holiday season. brining, specialized roasting techniques, alternation of heat, the aforementioned sous vide, all because I hate dry turkey as much as the rest of the world. What kind of effect is this loss of heat doing to all that precious moisture? I won't go into explicit detail about how I handled this interesting situation. I will just say it involved profanity, grain alcohol, and some pretty blasphemous remarks about the newborn baby Jesus.

Thankfully, it was Mrs. Boogie and her kin that came to the rescue. By liberating a few Coleman outdoor propane burners and a few cans of "nature's gas," we were able to push forward. Starches and the sous vide hit the hot plates. We had a cooking tray of buns seated atop the fireplace, slow baking into strange amorpous, but edible shapes. Mrs. Boogie was getting ready to make preparations to take our forlorn roast turkey and ham to another house that still had electricity, and hopefully continue the cooking process. By god, we may not eat like kings, but damnit we are going to eat.

We had finally gotten the kitchen into sub-operational status and Mrs. Boogie was about four blocks away when suddenly and magically, the power came back on. At this point in the game, it's almost 6pm and nobody has eaten a thing. There is a mad scramble into the kitchen, sharp knives and victimized vegetables are flying everywhere. Professional chefs would've trembled in fear at the speed and precision we were throwing stuff together. We were a finely oiled machine, a force of god to fear and behold.

Until..........the power went out again.

Eventually it came back on....again. And we proceeded as furiously as quickly as very hungry people tend to work. By the time everything was said and done, we did not sit down to eat until 10 at night. And the food? Surprisingly good. Definitely better than it deserved to be considering the circumstances.

And with some time behind me, I can say that even with these circumstances the way they were, Christmas wasn't too bad. In fact, I dare say I kind of enjoyed the challenge. And it certainly kept everyone together enjoying the time. So, as far has shitty Christmases go, this one was nowhere near the bottom.

Still I can't help but be pissed at the power company. I mean, what the hell did we do to you people? Everyone on this grid pays their bills, don't we deserve to have as much security in our power source as every other fucking family in the city? And don't tell me you don't know what's going on, this clearly isn't the first time this has happened.

So Rocky Mountain Power, I'm warning you. Get your shit together and make our grid work. Because if I lose one more holiday to this bullshit, I'm coming for you. And anyone wearing your company logo, who happens to be within range of my cutting knives, is going to be left brunoised and unpleasant.

You have been warned, I know where you people work.