emotional ping-pong

[0dense]

me, having gotten to the point in the year when I commute home in the dark and am very excited if I make it back before 7:30: :|

me on the bus, noticing that the city's put the lights back up in the trees: :D


Also, director and I are planning our door-decorations for the department halloween competition, and also our new hires are finally (finally!) onboarding, so I need to figure out what responsibilities to share with the new folks so that I don't stay as late and can have some time to study too, because I love this job but it is consuming me. Hosted a workshop today though, and got good feedback! so we're doing something right at least. 




..................................literally as I was writing the above I got a ping about a bit of absolutely WACK local news and apparently if we're collectively shut down to the extent that I can't go to work, I'll be spending tomorrow writing a story about a nuclear project under these hills, so uh if we go dark, just find me by my vibes I guess

Comments

[yuuago]

Hopefully things will relax for you a little bit soon. Getting home that late just ain't good for a person.

Also re: the local news stuff. ?! 'Collectively shut down'? Sounds kind of scary. Is everything okay over there...?

[brewsternorth]

Lights in the trees for the win! My neighbourhood also does this along one specific footpath and it's preeeetty.

Work stuff sounds encouraging?

ACK on the wack local news, if it's what I think it is. Um, luck with the story about the nuclear project if you *do* get shutdown at work?

/eta: and it is. Weirdly first I heard of this wack local news was other folks in the same area mentioning on Twitter how they were prepping for blackout conditions. Despite the wildfire that sort-of-prompted it being international news.

[0dense]

hi! in retrospect I was def melodramatic out of irritation, sorry for being worrysome!

last year california had those massive fires largely because of our local electric company being incompetent and dangerous and sparking off. Camp Fire is on them. And so, to prevent that from happening this year, they have decided to do rolling blackouts whenever they think the weather is bad (hot, dry, and windy) enough. And I'm very glad to not be on fire! but they also had an entire year to properly address this, and instead, the power company is not providing power. And apparently they'll be doing this for up to a week.

it's just so unnecessary. I'm fine with blackouts, personally; it happens, we'll live. but they gave us six hours of warning for a decision that had been made at least a whole day ago (I know someone who's low-ranked in PG&E, so she knew a day ahead but didn't spread the word. But a decision like this can't be a snap move, and we didn't even get warning that they were considering it), and I think that's vastly unfair. Like, hospitals deserve more time to prepare! They have generators for a real emergency, but we don't need to cause one! A single relief tent for shade and water per county for impacted people is so insufficient it's an insult.

I mentioned being shut down because I take public transportation, and I wasn't sure the trains would be running. Instead, it turns out BART can pull power from lit districts to keep the trains running (and isn't that a ridiculously sci-fi thought! how is this real) even when the stations are on generators, and everyone overcompensated for that and drove, so buses and overland traffic was impacted as well as traffic lights being down. If it would have had to take me two hours to get to work, I would've stayed home and no one would've judged me.

Luckily so far I've been in powered zones, and I'll always give thanks not to be on fire, but it's just ...so frustrating. Last year facilities were closed for poor air quality from smoke; this year schools are closing because there's no power. I cannot say that this is appropriate behavior from PG&E.

So yeah, we're not too happy with PG&E these days! But: it's not a danger! I'm very sorry to've made you worry! OTL

[0dense]

omg yeah I didn't realise that this would end up being quite so big a story, but I suppose california certainly has a toe in the door to social media! And yeah, tbh I've had more trouble with people acting like it's the apocalypse than actual blackouts. "Guys, we don't need to all be buying ice at once, it'll be okay. It's rolling blackouts, not five straight days!" But it took people half an hour to get gas, I heard.

but omg so I did do a bit of research at work and it turns out there really had been a nuclear plant in the outer bay area at one time, but they closed it for, of all things, sitting on a fault line-!
this is california! we're made of fault lines! why wouldn't you check that, and why would you have put such a delicate and potentially lethal facility on a coastline known for earthquakes!?! like, you know I'm all for the clean energy, but it shouldn't live right here lmao

so I had been thinking about something set at LBNL, but apparently I've got narrative options lol. I wasn't meaning to bring in an earthquake or other disaster to the plant; my vague concept would actually be that a nuclear-powered facility is one of the few specks of light left after a different kind of disaster. maybe a research team was so buried in their work that a social event sails right over their head, and they look up and realise they're one of the few pockets left? (I'm not ruling out a zompocalypse, until something better occurs!)

[brewsternorth]

it turns out there really had been a nuclear plant in the outer bay area at one time, but they closed it for, of all things, sitting on a fault line-!

I read about this! They really didn't think it through. And now they've got all this nuclear waste hanging about. Still in proximity to a seismic fault.

In the same book (Mad Science by Joe Mangano: it's very antinuclear but a cogent read) I also found out about the nuclear power plant they nearly completed on Long Island, perilously close to a) a number of airports/flight test facilities; b) Manhattan; c) the track of some Atlantic hurricanes. They couldn't make it safe enough to satisfy the regulators, so they had to abandon it. Now it's the site of a windfarm and a gas-fired power station.

Pandemic disease instead of zompocalypse, perhaps?

[yuuago]

Oh, I see! Thanks for the explanation.

It's good that there's no fire danger right now, but it sounds like the power company is going about things in an extremely shitty way. :|

[0dense]

0.0 on long island! what are they thinking! Wind, yeah, and hydroelectric, those sound like the ways to go on the east coast.
But that sounds like a cool read, I'll keep an eye out for it! I'm down to read something with a strong agenda if it's also got fair information. (That's actually a bit how I feel about Higginbotham and his book on Chernobyl: amazing research and very valuable interviews, even if he brings an artificial hero/villain narrative in sometimes)

ooh yes though, love me a good pandemic story. And they would've been protected because of the lab's security! something airborne would maybe spread fast enough for dramatic purposes, but the clean room / environmental protections could've been strong enough to keep it out (handwaves at the biosafety industry a bit). long-lasting viral pathogen with a liquid/aerosol vector, maybe. Like nipah/MEV1, Contagion was actually pretty good according to the folks I knew in lab safety.
ooh, actually, black plague is still around here in ground squirrels and such. maybe the pneumonic version went haywire?

[brewsternorth]

Good to know about Higginbotham. I started with Serhii Plokhy's "Chernobyl", just because my library happened to have it in, and notwithstanding the unanswered question of whether Fomin was *actually* in a car accident or if he fell from a balcony trying to break back into his apartment, it's a good synthesis of the history to date, as well as a good read.

[0dense]

hey yeah Plokhy! I think that's actually my favorite of the contemporary books I've read on Chernobyl. I have so many sticky notes on the copy I got from the library, I might just get it for myself for Christmas...