There was a major power outage this morning that affected the Iberian Peninsula. People say it was a russian cyber-attack but the news say it was an unexpected outage in a french supplier or sumthin'. As you can imagine, sure, there was no electricity, meaning there were no functional traffic lights, no trains or subways, no water pumps, and many more services were halted. As I write this, yes, the power has returned, but many of these services are still dead. Especially water, horrible timing, as my family for once forgot to buy their usual two water carboys and I am suffering from seasonal allergies which I've never had before, making me extremely thirsty.

I went to college with my laptop this morning, hoping I could finish and deliver a document for Portuguese History of Arts, and had to come back because they had to close the campus. I was fortunate enough to catch the only functioning boat back home. Until I got there, I could not speak with my family because our signal provider was one of the few to become completely dead. Slept through the rest of the day. Though the power's back, I'm still very nervous - there's the water that may not come back until it's been days, there's everything else that needs to pick up its pace again... and the paranoid fear that this will happen again, that there will be a second and a third outage. This episode goes to show that we are very much dependant on electricity to live. If this was, in fact, work of israelite, russian, american, whatever terrorists... a single carpet bombing and that was it. It leaves us horribly vulnerable.There's no way for us to prepare for another blackout because we've failed ourselves - there are no other sources of energy that can power the country consistently aside from outside providers and when resources vanish, nobody even thinks of communal kitchens and other methods of distributing necessary goods. We've been taught to hoard, and hoard we do.

We take things for granted and one day it's gonna bite us in the butt.