Blowing in the wind

Okay so we have lived in this house for 6 years now and have never had so many power utages as we have had this year!
Two weekends ago I went to coffee with some of the other BSA mom's and while I was gone the house lost power for about 45 minutes, last weekend we lost power for a little while (I think 3 hours), now yesterday morning we lost power at 2am but it came back on within about 15 minutes....then some animal, not an owl (at least not any type of owl I've even heard) started scawking outside our window for 1/2 hour and kept me awake...then about 2:50 it finally shut up and I was able to try to get some sleep.

3am: BOOM!!! BOOOM!!!! Crackle crackle....lights out! Aw man! The winds came in fast and furious....I thought I heard hail but it was just big bits of tree falling on the house.

Hubby didn't get much sleep either....I love the light shows, but they can keep the acoustics!...thunder scares the piss out of me if it gets with in 2 miles, more than that and it usually isn't too loud...so hubby was getting clung on a LOT with my clawed fingers. I should get a photo of my nails up but they aren't as long as they usually are and I just broke off two of them this week.

Anyways...so when the storm started to die down--they decided to sound the sirens (gee you think??) and I called the power company to report the outage....we learned at the old house that if the power goes out the cordless phones will not work so always keep a land line in your home.

The said it would be fixed in 4 hours...okay so that's around 7:30am....I can handle that. I got my iPod for the alarm feature so hubby wouldn't be late for work (he leaves at 6am) and we settled down for the night...hubby? Head hit the pillow he was out cold; me? I listened to "Njal's Saga" for about 2 hours until I finally fell asleep...only now I don't remember what episode I'm on or where I am in the story as I was fading in and out of sleep (made for interesting dreams though ;-0 )

So alarm goes off and hubby is running late so I decide to call "Lights Out" again to see when they will have it up and running....its about 6:40am now and the recording says the power should have been up 15 minutes ago. Okay so they will be up any moment right? Hubby says if they aren't up by 730am to let him know so he can get a generator.

well I'm bored ...nothing to do without lights. No cable, no modem, no internet, no streaming audio, no blogs to check for trivia questions...so I called the light company again. Now before you think I'm bugging anyone, it is all automated....only thing it does is put my name on a service list by area so the most it will do is say that I've called a few dozen times. So 7:15am I call and they have changed the estimated fix time....11:30 pm tomorrow! Well that's not going to work....I have two chest freezers and a full sized up right freezer chucked full of cow, pig, and chickens...not to mention the other stuff in there too. Plus there are the two refridgerators full of stuff.

Okay hubby has a line on a generator...its not one from work, but they are going to rent one for him (no charge, ain't that nice?)...but he can't get it here till later. So I tie shut the doors on the side-by-side in the kitchen to keep the kids out. If we keep everything shut and undisturbed it should be okay for 24hours.

The biggest problem....no electricity, no water. We have a well...no city water here. Granted it means our clothes don't smell quite as nice as everybody else's with the recent drought, but we don't have to pay for water either. BUT its times like this I really miss the old city water system.

Because not only does this mean we can't make any thing to drink, it also means I can't do dishes...or make food on the stove (oven is electric, stove has electric ignite), but it means we can't flush.

YUP, 5 people, one house and one toilet that gets used most. We would have enough water in the holding tank for two fills of the toilet tank...so no flushing unless someone is sick. Off the chains come from all the toilets so no one can do it by accident.

Now there is also a second reason we can't flush....we have a septic pump that takes the waste out to the holding tanks...you don't really want to know how they work, trust me....because the city doesn't have a sewer system either. Without power the pump doesn't turn on and the waste will build in the pipe work until it has no where else to go, but up & out the sink/tub drains...yuk, don't want that under any curcumstances---trust me! Two years ago we had our drain field freeze and kept blowing the cover off our septic tanks...yuk. The farm barn at your local state fair smells better, trust me.

So no water, no toilets, no power, 4 kids no tv or computer (well the oldest has a laptop we got him for college so he was okay), no a/c, no radio, no lights. Luckily I used to be a teacher so I know enough to keep stuff on hand so little hands don't become Loki-play.

Hubby came about noon with the generator...and an electrician (YEA!!) and they tried to figure out how to set this thing up. We bought the house from my inlaws and FIL was used to power failures from his time in Ill on the big farm so he had a by-pass system set up on the house just in case (thank you FIL) but for some reason he didn't set up a way to connect the power to the outside that was "code"...so the electrician worked something out that was legal...got to love the company hubby works for, they are so nice about stuff like this....and we were off the grid but with a gas-generator within 2 hours.

All we had to do was figure priorities....freezers, refridgerators, pump house, well room...that's all I would have been happy with. BUT they found that the generator was so good that we could have ran just about normal in the house...although we did notice the slight fluxuations in the power level that normally we ignore so we decided that (a) a/c would only be ran long enough to pull out humidity then shut off so we didn't damage the compressors, (b) computers might be damaged from the inconsistent flow of power, laptops could only be charged on the system but no computers could be ran off it, (c) dish and clothes washers would have to waite since we weren't sure if it would damage their motors as well (my clothes washer is 20 years old and running great, I'm not taking any chances--that's another story for another day).

So with these simple rules in mind hubby went back to work. I double checked the "Lights Out" message again to see what the estimate was....the "vast majority" of customers were supposed to be up by 3pm the following day (which would have been today)...we tried calling our neighbor next door to see if she needed water but there was no answer--we thought she may have been staying at a hotel or something (she recently lost her husband so she has been staying with relatives/friends/hotels a lot lately). Then we wondered if she didn't have all cordless phones in the house, but we didn't see movement and her dogs weren't out so we figured she was gone.

At 4pm when hubby came home (yes he actually did get some work done yesterday) we decided that we would get McDonald's for supper instead of taking the chance of the generator running out of gas during the night and not having the freezers cold enough...plus I didn't have anything thawed out anyhow. So my oldest son stopped by the store on his way back from class and brought 6 gallons of water and we filled our camping jug with another 5 gallons of well water.

Hubby decided to give our neighbor another try...low-n-behold she was home! She does have cordless phones...hubby asked if she needed any water since the power was out and we have a 5 gallon jug if she needed it. No she said, she had benn on her way down the steps into the dark basement when the power came back on. We figured we ran about 1/2 hour on the generator when we didn't have to.

Oh well it was nice to know she was okay and safe anyhow.

When hubby and I were first married my folks lost their power and so my dad borrowed a generator from my brother and they made a "gay" plug (that is a male plug on either end, its what they call it in the business, sorry). and he took himself off the grid. Well mom and dad were the only house with power for the longest time...when they noticed that their neighbors got power back they disconnected from the generator---and lost power. Dad thought he had fried something in the wiring and boy was he getting an ear full from mom!

Turned out that when NSP came out to hook everyone back up they saw he had lights so they didn't bother to check any of his connections, not realizing that he was on a generator. You know they had the nerve to try to charge him for the visit out to hook him up?? He fought it, and actually won!

Cute story but back to my saga....
About 3:30p I had gone down to get mail and I saw what I thought was two power company trucks...one on the other side of the highway and one a little ways from the end of our drive...so hubby and I took a walk to watch the crew and he decided to go talk to the crew by our drive, but saw they weren't power, they were cable comany guys....appearently when you lose power for the cable/modem you will lose power for the digital phone to (they don't mention that in the ads do they?) How did they fix it? They hooked up a generator to provide the power.

About 8pm last night we lost cable & internet again...power was fine. So I called the cable company--on my regular service phone, I might add--to report the outage. So I'm talking to the rep telling him I have no cable or internet when he asks if I have digital phone...well no, DUH, I'm talking to him from my home phone! What an idiot. I told him I knew what the problem was and they could do two things to fix it...either put more gas in the generator or go back on the power grid.

Oh no, it couldn't be that, they had to send a signal to my cable and modem boxes to see if I was getting a signal. I told them well of course I wasn't getting a signal, they didn't have any power to send it. So they put me on hold again--for 20 minutes!! No way am I giving up my place in line thank you, I'm a tad stubborn btw...so then I get someone completely different.

She says, well I'm in an area experiencing a service outage. Oh great, another Einstien! No I said we were fine until about 1/2 hour ago just before I was put on hold....I know what the problem was and explained it all again. Well you're in a service outage area she says...I took a deep breath and told her that our city is NOT listed in the recording of cities experiencing an outage and I wanted a refund for the day since I didn't consider 4 hours of service a full day and I wasn't going to pay for a full day.

They had our cable up in 1 hour from the time I got off the phone.

So hubby totally over reacted to having to wait for cable...what? He had to watch dvd's instead...yeah he had to watch on dvd the show he wanted to watch on cable...????? what's the big deal?

I however wound up missing the rest of the RoyRoger/DaleEvans marathon that they were running on TCM. I was looking for those "sequenced" shirts that Bruce Willis mentions in "Die Hard"...love that movie...granted mostly because it has Alan Rickman (aka Snape ;-)~~~~) and "Karl"....got to love muscular blondes...I love Rickman in a beard! Gruber, Sheriff of Nottingham....oh how I wish they would have given Snape a beard!

Well I better go before my computer shorts out from all this drool!