Information Withdrawal

The last of Ike ripped through here Sunday, and we can count ourselves among the fortunate - no trees down and just a brief power blip. The cell tower that we draw service from was apparently having problems, so we found ourselves pacing around the first floor playing Hot and Cold with the phones, but that wasn't a terrible inconvenience. Cable was knocked out, but I have stacks and stacks of books to read and was happy to just be able to go to bed early and read.

The only problem? The loss of Internet access. I was completely undone. Not only could I not find out what was going on in the world, how bad the damage was, etc., but I couldn't help wondering what would happen if I wanted to know something. What if I needed to know what the largest city in Qinghai Province is? What if I wanted to see what the interior of a '59 Chevy looks like? How could I find out the average temperature in May in Minnesota? A thousand times a day, it seems, I satisfy my curiosity about something - the subject of a Charles Russell painting, the anatomy of a cat's jaw, restoring and repairing doors. Lately, I've looked up Parabolon magic lanterns, the hull dimensions of the HMS Erebus, and the history of the Pablo Allard buffalo herd. I've also looked up Clean House episodes, Nanci Griffith song lyrics and pictures of English bulldog puppies, just in case you thought I was over here overdosing on Wikipedia.

I was nervous until Monday morning when Google finally loaded again. Eliminating uncertainty, even if it's about small, esoteric topics, is a comfort, maybe even more so since everything in the world seems so uncertain. If small questions have answers, maybe big ones do too.