If a tree falls in a forest, probably nobody except conservationists care very much. If a gigantic, century-old (or more) tree suddenly has one of its tree-sized branches fall off and block an entire street and take the power out with it, lots of people care. Yesterday this happened around the corner from us. It was fascinating to walk over there and see this massive piece of a tree lying in the middle of the street—and the even more massive tree it used to be a part of still looming over the street. I tried not to think about my kids walking past that tree every day on the way to school, or the fact that I had driven by it about 10 minutes before it fell.

Anyhow, this branch falling knocked out the power at our house from 2:50pm to 1:30am. And it was just the few houses around ours: houses a block away had power. The PG&E guys were working on the power lines the whole time (including at 11pm, Right Outside Our Window) and I don’t know who they had with chainsaws in the middle of the night cutting up that tree. I couldn’t sleep (what with PG&E guys right outside our window and chainsaws going nonstop half a block away) so I got up and went to my computer.

Darin gave me a 13-inch Macbook Air for my birthday this month and this is by far the best Macintosh laptop I’ve ever had. Holy God, is it great. It’s as fast (or maybe somewhat faster) than my 2009 Macbook Pro. It’s so light that I walk around the house carrying it with one hand. I’m sincerely annoyed by Intuit’s refusal to update Quicken for Mac, so my financial software life is somewhat in flux, but in all other aspects the Macbook Air completely and totally rocks. And it helped me learn two very important lessons.

Lesson 1

Despite the power having gone out at 2:50pm, the Air still had 90% battery life when I opened it up at 11pm. I read a friend’s new book, I worked a little bit on a couple of plays I’m writing, and I wrote a gigantic journal entry about all the things that were bugging me (and doing their part to keep me awake). At 1am or whenever I went upstairs, I had about 70% battery. This thing has amazing battery life. I’d kind of been aware of it before (certainly had better battery life than my Macbook Pro, which seemed more interested in seeing if it could make batteries bulge than in using them for a long time), but last night completely amazed me.

Lesson 2

I am never moving to an Internet-based computer like a Chromebook. There are tons of reasons not to use a Chromebook already, but if my computer had been Internet-based, it would have been a paperweight last night. I know they’re talking about making web-based devices that have locally-based applications so you can still use them when you don’t have Internet access, but in that case, why not get a computer that functions that way all of the time?

If you’ve written an application and your only help for it is an online page, let it be known that I find that very annoying. Particularly at midnight, when I’m cranky.

Lesson 3

The ice in the freezer was still loose when I checked it this morning. The very bottom layer was more molded together, but I could have easily filled several glasses with ice. Our refrigerator did a very good job of holding in the cold while the power was out.