The Great Power Outage of Ought-Eleven!

Wednesday morning was filled with Dr appointments and Greek class and such and it was about 1:30 when we finished lunch and headed for the house - to find that the power had just gone out!

Later we leaned that a big semi had turned into our subdivision, hooked some low-hanging wires, pulled them down and a power pole with them, setting the power pole on fire in the process. In other words, a big, going to take a while to fix this mess kind of mess. A long while.

Barb went to a couple of appointments while I sat out on the patio in an attempt to catch a breeze and tried to read. Tried, because my appointment had been with the eye doctor. I'll blog about that later, if I can find some euphemistic way to say "poke in the eye with a sharp stick", which I'm pretty sure you don't want to read about.

We spent some time deciding where we could go for supper that was a) a long, long way to go, and b) took forever to get served, and were fairly successful at that, but the lights were still out when we got home.

You know, there's a reason that our forefathers went to bed when the sun went down. When it gets dark and all you have for illumination is a couple of candles and a flashlight, there's just not much you can do! Well, there is one thing, and birth rate statistics bear great witness to historic blackouts, but seriously. Reading is out. TV, radio, stereo - no. The laptop is okay for a while, but of course there is no Internet. iPhones have Internet, but we need to save the batteries because those are now our only telephone service. So basically what's left is talking to each other.

He said: "So, how are you?"
She said: "Fine."
He said: "How are the kids?"
She said: "Grown."

Fortunately, it wasn't the middle of Winter, so we didn't have to pull out every blanket in the house, nor did we have to sleep out in the back yard because it was still 95 degrees at 10pm (though it did reach 92 on Wednesday, and it was definitely stuffy with no breeze to speak of). I sat in the dark and thought things like... if we had a generator, where would we put it? And... maybe we shouldn't have sold the Coleman lantern in the garage sale.

Power was restored about 10pm - phones and internet came back sometime in the middle of the night. Our air-conditioned, plugged-in, turned-on, must-have-noise-in-the-background lifestyle was safe.

At least until the tsunami.