Power outages are back, and they are 3 hours of power vs 6 hours of blackout. It’s all about the deficit of energy generation after the recent russian attacks. Emotionally I don’t react to them as strongly as I used to, maybe because of the anxiety medication, maybe I am just preparead and I know I can get through this. With your help I have two power banks and a lamp, so I can do work, draw or embroider and even watch some downloads from Netflix in the background.
The art of charging everything, doing laundry and taking showers all within a 3-hour period is taken to the absolute. We all schedule our life around power outages, we know local “unbreakable points” where you can get wifi or charge your phones in a bind, so it’s not so bad, and every time power goes out, we just say “fuck you russia” and go do our things.
For now I have two issues with it:
It’s very hot in Odesa in summer and the refrigerator cannot cope with the outages. I have to clean it daily, and I have to be careful with my food because it spoils faster. It just means more trips to the store and smaller portions, especially with meat and dairy.
When the power is out, my mobile connection also goes out, especially if an air raid happens at the same time and our soldiers use the whatever-it’s-called-thingy that blocks the signal and prevents russian drones from correcting their targets. I already had my mom panic when I did not reply after an explosion in the city. As you can imagine it is pretty scary to hear a bomb explode and have your child offline. For this specific reason I installed a power-independent internet. But it also needs some sort of battery to run a router thingy. Now, I did buy a special internet-router UPS thing last year, and I did it just as the previous power outages stopped. I barely used it. Now when the current power outages started, I found out that UPS died. I took it for repairs, paid 50% of what it cost, and it gave me 70 min of charge when the promised time was 8 hours. So here I am torn between thinking if i should pay another 50% to hopefully get it FIXED-fixed, or give up and buy a new one. Money is not something that I can spare, with anxiety meds, my dad’s health, and the legal thing that I have to juggle. Plus I have to think about winter.
Now, according to an interview I read, winter will be even worse, we’ll be getting 2 hours of power instead of 3 (and that is if russia leaves us alone from now on). And the question of heating comes up. We have a centralized heating system in most of the houses in Ukraine which means no power - no heat, and with power on for only 2 hours at a time, the heat will not even reach my apartment. It’s a good thing I make trench candles as a volunteer, chances are this is what I will be using to stay warm this winter.
But our electricity guys are amazing, they fix things with amazing speed, and lots of EU countries are helping us with equipment to fix things, so maybe it won’t be that bad, even now they did not turn the power the entire weekend (with less usage by big companies I guess).
For now I am focusing on fixing my health and fixing my Internet.
PS. Uploaded some photos to Gallery