This week, during her brief visit to Puerto Rico, our friend Irma didn’t cause nearly as much damage as we all expected, as I mentioned in my previous post. The main problem that most of us felt was the loss of power in houses and businesses. This wasn’t the case for everyone but more than 50% of houses and businesses lost power.
This meant no light, air conditioner, refrigerator, microwave, computer, TV, etc., unless you had an electrical generator. I think I would have gone crazy if II spent one more day without light and I don’t feel good saying that because I know that not everybody has this. After the hurricane, people, including myself tried to find electrical outlets to plug in their devices, mostly cell phones, everywhere; the hallways at the mall were full of people charging their phones, tablets or computers. If you had a generator at home, that was a good place to charge your devices and the car. You could see people in parked cars just charging phones, but this was a good excuse to get air conditioning too.
I limited my blogging to writing mostly on my cellphone to save battery on my computer to use it to charge my phone later, but I never stopped blogging during this time. And this is when I realized that this is something I really take for granted, being able to write and share what’s on my mind and my experiences with you. Not only do I take my ability and freedom to do this for granted but everything else, and it’s not just me. Seeing all those people looking for a plug in the mall made me see how none of us could survive without a phone now.
This hurricane was a real eye opener, it showed me all the things we take for granted or just don’t notice how much we depend on them. But I tried to pay less attention to my phone to save the batteries, I played Dominos instead of Candy Crush and I read instead of watching TV. I remembered that I don’t always need to be attached to my cell phone, computer, tablet or TV; I can have fun without these.
Also I decided I will try to read before going to sleep instead of watching Netflix, I did it during the hurricane and I had no trouble falling asleep, even with no air conditioning.
Unstoppable María 