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by Pete Bodo
I hope you all had a good time at Deuce Club last night and today. I had originally intended to post on Davis Cup this morning, but then my house nearly burned down. We arrived at the farm in a massive downpour, around midnight, and as soon as we entered the lights started doing crazy things (like exploding).
Well, after getting the family off to bed and assuring them everything was going to be okay, it suddenly wasn't. A powerful surge of electricity through my office room upstairs basically melted an entire four-outlet power strip and the resulting heat and sparks set a rug on fire. I grabbed the hot cord and yanked it out of the wall. The fire was still pretty small fire, and I managed to beat it out quickly - after which I shut down all power and slept downstairs so that we'd have someone alert on both floors. Lying in the dark, thinking about things, I realized that my own home smelled acrid, exactly like the streets of New York did on the hot and humid night of September 12, 2001.
When I woke in the morning and looked out the window, I saw the split tree and our electric (and phone) lines down. I got in touch with our Delaware County Electric Co-op, and over the next few hours, I got a crash course from their emergency service unit on electricity and how it works in your home.
I still don't think I could explain it if you gave me half-the-day. It's complex stuff.
But by around 5 this evening we were back up and running. The weird thing is that half-a-dozen appliances that have digital components (cordless phone, Jenn-Aire electric range, modem, my Monitor heater) all appear to have burned out. Yet my relatively new flat-screen TV and satellite dish receiver are fine. Thankfully, I always unplug this computer so it was unaffected. But these days, a computer without Internet access is like a truck without tires. Where you gonna go with it?
Anyway, I'm not above crowing about having sensed a Davis Cup upset in the making in France, but I didn't imagine it would be a blowout. I guess there were strange power surges happening all over the place yesterday. The Davis Cup highlight today is apt to be the Novak Djokovic vs. Marin Cilic battle of the no. 1s (for Serbia and Croatia, respectively), with Croatia down 1-2 and on the brink of elimination.
If you know enough about Davis Cup and Serbo-Croatian history and politics, you can see how this is simply going to be a huge match; with all manner of overtones (not all of them pleasant). It's another of those moments that can only happen in Davis Cup. It's a great opportunity for Djokovic to earn back some stud capital following that puzzling, poorly played match against Tomas Berdych at Wimbledon. Djokovic is at the point where he needs to man up, and beating Cilic to clinch the tie for Serbia on Croatian soil would really get that job done.
The Russians are in a jam, too, down 1-2 at home in Moscow. But Argentina is snakebit in Davis Cup, often playing role of both snake and bite-victim. So I have a feeling that the Russians arre going to find a way to pull this one out.
The French. . . well, I assume those boys are still hung over.
Blogging note: I'm out of the office Monday and Tuesday; cowboy Luke and I are staying at the farm, where I plan to find time to post between bouts of mowing hay, kayaking in the pond, and watching my little boy eat ice cream at the general store. Life is good, especially if you don't burn the sucker down.