We lived surrounded by hanging power lines. If the trees took a sheet of ice, if the wind blew too hard, if the rain went on for over a day—any of these conditions could mean a sudden power loss. Usually the outage was an hour or so; sometimes it would be days.

We had a well in the front yard with an electric pump, so when we lost power we lost our water. We kept a rain barrel outside on the deck for years. We bought a plastic bag that looked like a giant condom and fitted it into our bathtub; we'd fill it with water when the weather report sounded sufficiently panicked. We had all sorts of devices that would recharge things in the car. After a couple days none of these measures could deliver a hot shower.

We had a good friend who managed a hotel further north. He invited us to stay and we went. I took the photo just getting out of my hot shower. I'm scowling because I thought it was funny.

I liked this photo so much I used a severely cropped version as a logo. It's also the one of the first times I've used the capacity of Photoshop to drain out the color, a process which can be precisely controlled. It still feels inauthentic to me; this is something you only have a feeling about, you can't measure it. I stopped using the logo after my family complained that the scowl painted me in too negative a light.