It's Electric!

A week ago Saturday (er, Sunday morning), I was woken up around 1:00am by my husband saying, "The power is out."  Um...huh?  So, he wanted me to grab a flashlight and help shine his way down the basement steps so that he didn't fall and break a neck or something on, you know, all the random socks and towels that get thrown down the stairs on a daily basis.  *cough* 

He explained as I tried to wake up that he was playing video games on that box with the X when everything went black...and yet the kitchen light over the stove was still on.  Huh.  So, he checked our fuse box there in the basement and strange? no circuits have been tripped?  We started fiddling with lights down there and noticed that random ones worked--along with the refrigerator down there, the heater (thank goodness!), and the washer--but not the dryer.  Huh.

We came back upstairs and played some more.  Really random stuff worked.  He tried tripping the whole house.  Nope.  Same random stuff worked and same did NOT work.  We peeked outside, and our neighbors to the left still had power, but we couldn't tell with the folks to the right (across the street is on a different grid).  So John decided to call the power company to see if there was some sort of outage, although it seemed unlikely.  Nope.

Meanwhile, the outage woke up Keith, who is not particularly comfortable sleeping without his closet light on (Oh boy, he's gonna find this post one of these days and completely DIE of embarrassment, isn't he?  Sorry, buddy!).  Anyway, Keith and I hung out while John went outside with the flashlight and started following the power lines around the house with the beam.  Wouldn't ya know it?  He found a break in one of the lines on the edge of our property!

So, another call to the power company where he gets to hit the Armageddon button, and goodness, he gets to talk to a real, live person!  She seemed unimpressed with John's finding of a broken power line and simply takes down his name, address, and the nearest intersection and says someone will come out.  And then...that's it.  John gets off the phone and realizes he doesn't even know WHEN someone will come out.  Now?  Tomorrow morning?  Um...?  Unhelpful person on phone..., hello?

Keith curls up on the couch, and I go back to bed (Sophia had awakened by this point, and she OF COURSE, needed to be nursed back to sleep.)  Around 2:15-ish I hear lots of noise of the big power company truck pulling in. 

Not 30 minutes later, the two guys had been shown the line, gotten their ladder out, spliced the line back together, gotten the power running right through the whole house again, picked up their flashing lights and orange cones, and left.  Neat.  We were all back in bed and slumbering within minutes.

Amusingly, Mary was staying the night with a friend that night and not part of the fun.  Her friends took her to a church-sponsored breakfast the next morning where the gentlemen sitting across from her sort of recognized her, got chatty, and ask her where she lived.  When she told him her street, they both realized why they recognized each other--it's the guy who lives across the street!  "Hey," he says, "What was going on at your house at 2:00 in the morning?  The dog woke me up barking his head off, and I see the power company blocking your driveway?"  Of course, she had no answer to that.  Heh.