Today started out like a day out of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

Our power went out, thanks to being near the outer rim of Hurricane Dennis. It went out sometime in the middle of the night, we don’t know exactly when.

What we do know is that our alarm system really dislikes not having power. From some mysterious power source, it retains the power to beep loudly every five minutes, asking for AC current. Which of course, we couldn’t provide.

Nor could we figure out how the #@*($&&%(&)@#*)$)# to get it to stop beeping every five minutes.

Around 6:15 am, Jill became determined to stop it.

Unfortunately, since it’s a security system, it doesn’t like it when people try to stop it from working. At one point, it started making a siren noise. That point was about 2 minutes AFTER Jill gave up and went upstairs. Somehow I got it to stop making the siren noise, but it took strong objection to the whole experience and beeped more frequently ever after.

Yanking the wires out of the walls is under consideration.

Shortly before 8 am, I decided that I had to get out of the house, torrential downpour or no, and I was going to work.

Our garage door is operated by an electric opener.

I am CERTAIN that it has a manual override, but nothing I pulled, twisted, flipped or pounded on triggered the manual override. So I woke Jill up again and she drove me to the MARTA for my first MARTA trip to work. It was quiet and uneventful until I got off at the stop near my office.

There was NOWHERE to cross Peachtree St between the MARTA and my office that avoided walking through close to three linear feet of ankle deep water. The cuffs of my pants are dry, but my socks and shoes are still wet. That was at 8:55 am, and it’s now 4:27 pm. Ick.

And when I got to my building, I realized that I’d taken my security badge out of my purse for the weekend and not returned it before setting out this morning.

But as I said to the guy in the elevator, the day could only get better.

THAT turned out to be true.

First, I found a message from my friend Cindy Samuels that she was in town for the day and could we have lunch? And Cindy had exciting news herself — she’s the guest editor of the current Ms. Magazine, which focuses on the upcoming Supreme Court nomination battle. She also had some wonderful ideas for book publicity.

Then I found out that Amazon is nearly sold out of my book!

I also had nice notes back from a couple of the people named in the book dedication and learned that a to-be-named-later privacy organization is probably going to review the book. And I sent a nice note along with one of my author’s copies of the book to one of my heroes, Senator Russ Feingold, to whom we made a special dedication in the book for his outstanding support of libraries and intellectual freedom.

And Jill says that we have power again.

Today started out like a day out of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

Our power went out, thanks to being near the outer rim of Hurricane Dennis. It went out sometime in the middle of the night, we don’t know exactly when.

What we do know is that our alarm system really dislikes not having power. From some mysterious power source, it retains the power to beep loudly every five minutes, asking for AC current. Which of course, we couldn’t provide.

Nor could we figure out how the #@*($&&%(&)@#*)$)# to get it to stop beeping every five minutes.

Around 6:15 am, Jill became determined to stop it.

Unfortunately, since it’s a security system, it doesn’t like it when people try to stop it from working. At one point, it started making a siren noise. That point was about 2 minutes AFTER Jill gave up and went upstairs. Somehow I got it to stop making the siren noise, but it took strong objection to the whole experience and beeped more frequently ever after.

Yanking the wires out of the walls is under consideration.

Shortly before 8 am, I decided that I had to get out of the house, torrential downpour or no, and I was going to work.

Our garage door is operated by an electric opener.

I am CERTAIN that it has a manual override, but nothing I pulled, twisted, flipped or pounded on triggered the manual override. So I woke Jill up again and she drove me to the MARTA for my first MARTA trip to work. It was quiet and uneventful until I got off at the stop near my office.

There was NOWHERE to cross Peachtree St between the MARTA and my office that avoided walking through close to three linear feet of ankle deep water. The cuffs of my pants are dry, but my socks and shoes are still wet. That was at 8:55 am, and it’s now 4:27 pm. Ick.

And when I got to my building, I realized that I’d taken my security badge out of my purse for the weekend and not returned it before setting out this morning.

But as I said to the guy in the elevator, the day could only get better.

THAT turned out to be true.

First, I found a message from my friend Cindy Samuels that she was in town for the day and could we have lunch? And Cindy had exciting news herself — she’s the guest editor of the current Ms. Magazine, which focuses on the upcoming Supreme Court nomination battle. She also had some wonderful ideas for book publicity.

Then I found out that Amazon is nearly sold out of my book!

I also had nice notes back from a couple of the people named in the book dedication and learned that a to-be-named-later privacy organization is probably going to review the book. And I sent a nice note along with one of my author’s copies of the book to one of my heroes, Senator Russ Feingold, to whom we made a special dedication in the book for his outstanding support of libraries and intellectual freedom.

And Jill says that we have power again.