State of Emergency

For all my life I have heard and seen pictures of natural disasters, and places that the President has declared in a "state of emergency" - I never thought I'd be living in one. To be honest, this is a surreal experience. I am fortunate that my house where I am staying has a really good backup generator, and we are pretty much business as usual, including internet. I can shower, do laundry, and get to sleep with a/c and my ceiling fan. Others are not so fortunate - the "Meadows" house is a small 3rd world country at the moment. Their generator is kaput, so the 30 or so people living there are trying to make the best of a very hot situation (its been in the high 90's the past 3 days with high humidity). Since the power still isn't back on, other houses are starting to take them in, including mine. Which means that we are up to about 10 women and one bathroom. The decision was made to rent a generator from NJ for the festival theater - this thing is HUGE! It took until about 4:30am to get it hooked up, but it is working. We discovered this morning that there are issues with some of the dimmers, that they don't dim - they are either all on or all off. Through tracing this issue, we discovered that the boxes that the local power company set up were not set up the way we thought, and that we had been running power off them slightly incorrectly. We got that issue sorted out - then discovered that we still had the dimmer issue. After more time and testing, we realized it is the computer "brain" of the dimmer boxes, and that both of them need to be replaced by next weekend. I also want to take a moment to talk about my boss, Tlaloc Lopez-Watermann. "T" is the Lighting Director for the festival, and by far the hardest working person I have ever met. He does his best to take care of anything anyone asks of him, whether it is the power grid for the festival, fixing the refrigerator truck at the fire house where we eat meals, or cutting trees and moving them off the roads to make them passable after the storm. He is amazing, and an incredible example to those around him of a positive, can-do attitude. I am truly blessed to be working with T and many other incredible, talented, people. So I'm okay, I have food, a/c, and internet. Hopefully soon the phones will be back up so I can call my mother.