It's like living in a dang third-world country sometimes

If I'd known the electricity would go out so often in Honolulu, I would have bought one of those hand-crank radios way back, right after the earthquake in September 2006, when the whole island lost electricity from morning until well into the evening.

This seems to happen a couple times each year. Geez, it's not like we live in the countryside somewhere.

Today we have been having a mild electrical storm (well, maybe not so mild: "M" and her neighbors believe they saw a tornado hovering over Waikiki... we'll have to see if any tourists are missing), but somehow the electricity has gone out all over this area. And it's getting dark. Zombies.

Okay, I should get back to my paper and my presentation, both due tomorrow. Except all the materials for those are both on my desktop, which doesn't work without juice. So on my laptop, with fifteen minutes of battery left, I can connect to the Internet, which mysteriously works. So does the landline. If this keeps up, if I want to finish my paper I may have to literally phone it in.

Sigh.

UPDATE:
The Honolulu Star-Advertiser has finally gotten around to explaining what's going on. And what "M" saw was a water spout, a funnel cloud over water. Cool. Hope no one got hurt.