The power went out last night a little before eight. I dialed the emergency number at Madison Gas and Electric and left an automated message reporting the outage. They ask if you would like to be called back when the power has been restored. This is a psychological test. I answered yes. Many people would say that they will know when the lights go back on, and they will not need a phone call confirming it. I think that if the power company thinks the lights are back on, I’d like to know that in case they really are not.
We set out in the car to do a little detective work. How wide an area? Did somebody knock down a utility pole? Did our neighbors have power? We found that the outage was localized, that our neighbors were in the same fix, and that there wasn’t any cause that we could see - no downed lines, no blown transformers. Hurricane Dennis had not drifted off course.
I discovered that while I have my printer plugged into the UPS - and my DSL line - the wireless hub is plugged into regular power, so no laptop surfing for me last night.
The power went out at ten to eight. We went for a drive. We got home and it was still plenty light until after nine pm. As it got dark we got out some candles. The candlelight was pleasant but not enough to support our reading habits. We wandered around turning things off: the overhead fans, the bedroom air conditioner, miscellaneous lamps, the accursed UPS that was beeping every so often to let me know that it still had no power. A little before ten we snuffed the candles and went to bed.
About ten minutes to eleven, my bedside light came on and the TV set started bawling from the living room. Must have missed those switches. Beth got up and turned things off once and for all. We snuggled back down into our interrupted sleep.
About 11:15 the power company called and an automated voice reported that our power was back. I wonder why the power went out.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Frank, I liked the way you shaped this piece. I had a clear picture of you and Beth. Did you ever learn what happened?
No clue, but the way the world works, there was probably a guy on call that took a couple hours to get to the job site on a Sunday night, and then about 10 minutes to change the fuse, or flip the circuit breaker or whatever.
Games of Scrabble used to be our “power out” activity. You can see well enough for that with candles.
Now that we have the Solar panels, Inverter and Battery bank hooked up, I miss Scrabble.
I was actually getting pretty ok at it. I don’t miss hard-packing boxes of snow to keep the meat freezers cold.
Or worse, worrying about the freezers when we lost power in the summer time. I did finally get a decent UPS for the computer and surge protector for the TV, but not before I burned out two power supplies on the computer and the TV screen has a decided purple tint on the right hand side. Tim Russert’s prose on Sunday morning Meet the Press is never quite up to his coloration.
We need to play more Scrabble around here… and not only when the lights go out. We used to play a lot and I was pretty lucky.