Kage Baker loathed the California power system.

She was a complete devotee of  electricity, not only depended on it, but liked it. Machines more complicated than a manual can opener and less sophisticated than a multi gigabite computer made her suspicious; she was a Luddite by degrees, not trusting anything unless it was hand powered or indistinguishable from magic.

The California power grid is a vast, vicious, badly-maintained machine. Kage imagined it as a series of sooty caverns manned by sooty goblins even less technologically ept than she herself was. She figured it ran on huge steam boilers fired with redwood logs and huge piles of used textbooks and government files. She was sure the wires were laid overhead specifically to be snapped by UFOs and gnawed on by squirrels. And she expected it to go out any minute.

God knows what she would have thought of last summer’s debacle, where PG&E burned down huge stretches of California. I think she would have been sourly unsurprised.

My power is unreliable tonight. I can’t use my wonderful new laptop. I am writing this on my Kindle tablet,  which is down to 24% power. But I have missed several days -it was a tough weekend – and I must blog!

This is, therefore, something of a placeholder. It may be Part One, if I can get better access.

So sorry, Dear Readers. But at least I have hit my mark.

Down to 21% now …