- At around 8:00 I met up with some friends who live down the street, and after hanging out at their apartment for awhile we went to try to pick up our other friend, who had waited hours to be ferried from Manhattan to Weehawken and was meeting us at an uptown diner. Due to traffic gridlock and the hundreds of other people waiting there- as well as the lack of cell phone service, we missed her the first time- and the second too- until we finally reached her about 3 hours later.

- After nightfall, auxilary power remained on in much of Hoboken, including a majority of the streetlights on sidestreets. But the main street in town, Washington Street, had no lights whatsoever- it really looked not unlike the apocalypse. You know how a street you know well can look completely different in daylight from how it appears at night? On Thursday Washington St. was like a third way- I honestly felt like I didn't know where I was, even blocks from my apartment.

- Now for the meta part of the story: as some of you know, I make my living as a reporter for a news service that covers the energy industry. And due to an early morning report that we put out daily, I am often required to be in the office in the wee, wee hours. Now I know many people, in NYC and elsewhere, had the day off from work Friday. But for my company that wasn't exactly an option- especially since this was the biggest national energy story since the Enron collapse, and possibly even bigger than that.

I fell asleep on my living room couch at about 1 AM, thinking that either the power would come back on and wake me up, or that it wouldn't come back on at all, in which case I wouldn't be able to go to work anyway. Come on it did, at 3:02 AM EDT, and I headed into the office two hours later. Without breaking any confidentiality agreements, I can say that it now appears the outage began in Ohio; my boss appeared on CNBC Friday morning to discuss the situation. Though I really wish our original impulse ("Blame Canada") had in fact been accurate.

-Yes, I know it's a cliche that "New Yorkers come together" in a time of crisis. And Lord knows I'm always the first one to point out New York elitism and/or condescension to the rest of America and Canada. But I notice that New York seemed to handle the crisis much better than, say, Cleveland; and there was indeed a welcome lack of looting, in contrast to '77.

Mayor Bloomberg, after bumbling like an idiot and showing no leadership whatsoever during such previous calamities as the near-transit strike, the February blizzard, and the James Davis murder, really stepped up this time and showed that he may just be growing into the job. Now if he could just do something about that stupid smoking ban...

So that's the story of the blackout- on the one hand an historical night that I'll never forget, but on the other- just other night at the office.