My father lost his job at the paper mill, but he got by for the first couple months on odd jobs, logging, welding and auto repair. My mother still had a steady job as a teacher, especially with so many families moved from electricity-starved cities to the countryside. Late in December, someone had the idea that the big paper mill where my father had worked, which had a 'cogeneration' plant that burned basically leftover sawdust to make electricity for the mill, could be started up again to produce electricity for the region. That brought my father back to work at the mill, with the only problem being that there wasn't enough lumber being brought to the mill because there wasn't enough diesel fuel for trucks to haul the wood. The Great North Woods had plenty of lumber, and no way to get it anywhere. There was barely enough diesel fuel around for trains. The solution was to bring old steam engines from a tourist railroad in New Hampshire, with guys who still knew how to keep steam engines running, and how to make them run on wood rather than coal or oil. Good old American ingenuity in action, with steam engines hauling logs out of the woods to a paper mill that was now a power station. The entire US electricity grid was being rebuilt, slowly, as the 'smart grid' we should have had decades ago, and lots of smaller local power stations rather than one giant plant for a whole region. The Kristang weren't helping much with rebuilding electrical generation around the planet, except in industrial areas they deemed vital to the war effort. Our new allies were disdainful that humanity still relied on fossil fuels for energy, and they set up a couple fusion reactors around the planet for their own needs, but even though they had explained their fusion technology to our scientists, it was going to be a very long time before humanity built a working fusion reactor on our own.

When I left, electricity was still spotty in my hometown, most of the power from the new power station in Milliconack went downstate to the Bangor area. My parents kept their house warm with wood stoves, didn't need air conditioning, and the garden we'd expanded over the winter should bring in plenty of crops to feed my family and the people living with them, plus food left over to sell. They had two cows now, and chickens for eggs, and when I left my mother had been bargaining for a pair of piglets. It was the same all over the world; people higher on the economic ladder before the Ruhar attacked were now sometimes worse off than those people who had been scraping by. If you were a farmer before Columbus Day, your life hadn't changed a whole lot, other than it being difficult to get fuel for tractors, since people still needed to eat, so there was plenty of demand. What did the Bible say, something like 'many who are first will be last, and the last, first'? Nobody ever expected scriptural prophesies to be delivered by alien invasion.