Power Outage (And Beer)

As you may or may not know, the only thing I resolved to do this year was drink slightly more. Not much, just a little. Each month I shall have at least one beer I have never tried before.

And so this month, I got a Sierra Nevada ESB - or Early Spring Beer. This is a seasonal offered by one of my favorite American breweries. I am a big fan of the Sierra Nevada line. The Pale Ale and Porter are both good. The pale ale is a bit on the hoppy side, so you have to like beer balanced more on the hops side than the malt side. The porter is just good all around. I can not remember trying any other selections from Sierra Nevada.

The stuff is made in California. I am in Florida. I am not exactly close to the brewery. The pale ale and porter seems to be somewhat easy to find here, but the other selections are not so easy to track down.

So anyway, this stuff is pretty good. It has a good color, and enough hops to make it something I would like. It is a bit "heavy", or at least that is how it felt. I do not think this would be a very good hot weather beer, but it works for this time of year.

That takes care of the new beer for this month! So far this resolution thing is going along well enough. I think I can manage to keep this up all year. This will be the first resolution in the history of the universe (all billions of years of it - the universe is not 6,000 years old) that I was able to keep. Assuming of course I keep it and do not forget about it one month.

I almost forgot about this month. But it is still February so all is good. I am still sticking to my resolution.

Compare this to whatever resolution you made? How is that going?

So what did we learn here? Make easy resolutions.

Not really too much more going on here. EXCEPT FOR........

The great Florida power outage of 2008. I was pretty much at ground zero for this. Well not exactly. I was 56 blocks south of ground zero. See there was this sub station that somehow had a fire. This set off a chain of events that resulted in a wide area black out.

The chain of events involved one sub station going dark, which caused a decrease in the energy demands, which caused the power plants to detect an excess load, which caused them to shut down. This of course caused other sub stations to go dark. In no time at all - and without humans doing anything - a good deal of the State was dark.

The system was designed to work this way. Reports of a "failure" at the nuke plants was just incorrect. There was no failure, except for one part of one sub station.

Traffic here sucks enough when the traffic lights are working. You should see how bad it is when the traffic lights all go dark.

Madness. Pure madness.