It’s been raining off and on all day.  Once the rain let up, the high winds kicked in.  Not just a gentle breeze or a puff now and then.  We’re talking some serious wind here!

The day didn’t start off very well anyway.  First of all, I had the most outrageous, improbable dreams last night.  I’m not talking about one of those single episode, one scene dreams that run a few minutes, but night-long dreams that came like chapters, all one unsettling story running throughout the night, complete with living color and Dolby 5.1 sound.  Oh, and they are lucid dreams.  That means that I know that I’m dreaming while I dreaming.  I can decide to change the content of the dream if I want to, but they were too interesting for me to consciously intervene. I wanted to find out what happened next.   I have those episodic type dreams too, but it’s not uncommon for me to have novel length dreams with plot, multiple characters, various locations and time sequences.  I should write books, but the dreams are too bizarre and often too personal to transcribe.  Anyway, I awoke several times in my dream and a couple of times in actuality.  Finally, at 9 am I realized that I was still in bed even though I was dreaming that it was 11 am, so I dragged myself unsteadily out of bed and did what everybody does as soon as they wake up.  It was then that I realized that I had forgotten to take my ” dizzy pill” last night.  You see, I have non-stop, twenty-four hour a day, 365 days a year vertigo.  The dizzy pills usually mitigate the vertigo to the extent that I can function reasonably well even though I always must make certain accommodations.  When I forget to take the medication at night, I know it instantly when I wake up.  So I took the pill this morning, first thing, then fixed a bowl of cereal.  I knew that I was too dizzy to drive a car.  I was even having trouble moving about in the apartment, so I didn’t attempt to go to church.  After about an hour and a half I decided to go back to bed, but couldn’t fall back asleep, so got up and dressed, hoping the vertigo would subside.  Well, it didn’t — and hasn’t.

So I have tried reading, getting myself aggravated by reading comments on Facebook, reading email, listening to some music and watching Netflix all day.  But…I return to the wind.

As a result of the high winds, the power keeps going off momentarily.  I’ve counted at least seven times so far.  Each time, off goes the TV, receiver, the cable router, the WiFi router and the two Apple TV’s – thus Netflix.  Also, my desktop computer restarts, the microwave oven beeps to indicate a power failure, my two printers recycle, my bio-garden aquarium, alarm clock and of course appliances all come back on.  After the last power failure, I gave up.   I lit candles all over, gave up on Netflix and all associated devices, turned off all the lights and decided to go off the grid. All of my clocks except for my alarm are either battery operated or antique weight or spring wound.  Resetting won’t be a problem but I’ll wait until morning or when the wind dies down.

Now being off grid means that I’m composing this sad little tale on my laptop–running on battery.  I’ll fire up my hotspot and upload this to my blog and Facebook pages before I surrender myself to reading a book on my iPad and enjoying the romance of a quiet candlelit evening at home.  If I listen to music on my iPod with headphones, can I still claim to be off the grid and back to the good old days of yore?  Perhaps not, but I’ve really reigned in my technology–I think!