Somewhere between adventure and madness

Here's a summary of yesterday's happenings:

4:15 am: Wake up when alarm clock goes off, stumble out of bed, make coffee and eat brioche (yay for awesome housemates who make delicious brioche!), pack up stuff for the day.
4:35 am: Leave house to go to school.
4:45 am: Leave school in massive F-250 pickup truck to pick up myrmecology and J.
5:15 am: Head out to Salt River to look at ants.
6 am: Arrive at Salt River. Check out locations of colonies I'd previously located (3 years ago). It's been a while since I've been back, and this year the dead weeds are knee-high and full of tiny, irritating hairs. On the other hand, we see a couple of good, active foraging trails before it gets too hot and the colonies shut down for the day.

9:30 am: Return to school and attend to business (planning things with my ever-intrepid undergraduates, taking care of ants and two newly acquired pets--an antlion and a Solifugid [or see the Wikipedia page here]). Both pets are mercifully small--they will get a bit scary as they get larger.
11:00 am: Power goes out.

11:00.10 am: Emergency backup power goes on.
11:00:20 am: Emergency strobes and klaxon* go off, and calm voice authoritatively announces that we shall evacuate the building (It sounds like the voice you'd hear in a Space Movie that's saying, "Attention, attention. This building will self-destruct in thirty seconds."). I grab my computer and backpack and go outside. Eventually, I decide to go over to the Law School for coffee and internet access.
11:30: I swing past the building again in the hopes I'll be able to go back in and grab my bike to ride over to a meeting in downtown Tempe. No such luck. I walk to the meeting. It's hot.

12:00-1:30: Meeting to discuss bicycle advocacy-related matters with my fellow TBAG board members.
2:00: Walk back over to my building to see if alarms are off yet. It's still hot out, and the alarms are still going full-force. Despite a gathered crowd of Very Important People, there's little information about what happened or how long it will take to restore power. People with sensitive equipment, experiments, delicate animals, or really important frozen stuff are all a bit on edge.
3:30: Power goes back on, finally. It's still hot out, and by now I've spent a good part of the day outside. I go inside and check on all of the freezers and incubators on our floor, which appear to have returned to full power.

4:30: I go home and work on some arrangements for our Seattle-to-Portland adventures.
5:30: I ride to the grocery store to get food and something that will pass as dinner.
6:50: I eat and go to ceramics to work on some nifty projects.
9:45: I ride home and do some chores around the house.
11:30: Bed, finally.

I was supposed to go on a bike ride this morning, but I didn't quite make it for some inexplicable reason [/sarcasm]. Today's technically a holiday, but I'm a graduate student, so that doesn't necessarily mean much, especially given that there were things I needed to get done yesterday that I didn't finish. Ah well. Today shall bring: more bike stuff, a bbq, and some work sprinkled in here and there.

*slight exaggeration here.