Storms

Ah, the lovely rumble of thunder reminds me of something I didn't write about last week: our power outage. My spouse and I were heading back from downtown about 5 p.m. last week (July 2), and the water was so deep that cars were being stranded left and right. We kept on plowing through, expecting at any moment to also be waterlogged. We did manage, fortunately, to make it home, only to find that our power was out. Our usual concern for safety did us in. All our exterior doors are not just locked but also dead-bolted from the inside since we mainly come and go through the garage. Alas, garage doors with no electricity cannot be opened manually from the outside, so my massively un-muscular husband tried to jimmy the back garage door with a credit card. Given his notorious lack of patience, that lasted for maybe two or three minutes before he He-Man-like busted the door down. (To think how easy it would be for a criminal to get in! If my thin spouse can break down the door, some muscular bad guy would have been able to do it even easier.)

Then he pulled open the garage door. That was good in that we could get inside, but inside, there was no power either, of course. No coffee, no supper (except for non-perishables or that which had yet to perish). I lit candles, he set up the generator to run the sump pump (oh, how I hate being enslaved by a sump pump!), and we muddled through the evening, expecting power to be restored at any time. In the past, our power outages were always short.

We have a tiny, two-inch-screen portable tv, but after seeing on the news that power could be as long as five days before it was restored, we made our plans for the night. He slept on the sofa to be as near the outside portable generator as possible, and I slept upstairs. We could not open windows because it was still raining. (Later we found that we'd had about 5 inches in a pretty short period of time.)

We showered by candlelight the next morning, which oddly isn't half as romantic as it sounds, especially since we each hurried through the scantest of showers to save as much of the remaining hot water in the water heater as we could.

Finally that afternoon we regained power, but much of the area truly was without power for days to come. I think the final customers were restored on Sunday. So now, the esteemed one happens to be downtown making the big move from one office to another (I think they force them to change offices every couple of years just to keep them from accumulating too much stuff!). I'm home alone, other than with Simon the Wonder Cat (i.e., it's a wonder he doesn't hide under the bed during storms), hoping that if we do get some bad weather, it will be after my husband gets home and it won't result in power outages. This old girl does like modern-day electricity! S.