How I Spent My Monday Afternoon
Yesterday afternoon I was sitting around in the dark. Except of course it wasn't really dark because it was daytime and the sun was peeking through the overcast.
The power went off a little past noon. I first called my dad, who lives about a mile away, and found out his electricy was still on so I knew this had to be pretty local to my neighborhood. (Little did I realize just how local...)
When things were still out 20 minutes later, I just gave up on trying to get back to what I'd been planning on doing—cooking lunch, running the dishwasher, taping a tv program, and catching up on email—and decided to just go get the errands done then instead of leaving them until later as originally planned. Of course, with all the road work going on around here, this took almost two hours rather than the 30-45 minutes it would have taken under more normal circumstances.
New since the day before—grrrrr.....
Got home a little past 2:30. Still no lights, computer, or tv. Called the power company. The computer answering the phone informed me that the cause of our blackout was "equipment failure" and that we should have our power back on around 3 p.m. Turns out that only 17 electrical customers were in the dark this time. Very local—not even our whole block. So I pulled out my book and read a few more pages. Unfortunately, my reading chair is far enough from the window that the lighting on the page was less than wonderful so I couldn't keep that up very long because of my middle aged eyes. Three o'clock came and passed without electricity.
But just as I was wondering if I should call the PSE computer again for an update, there arrived on the scene a couple of trucks (driven by hunks, I might add—UPS drivers have nothing on these guys!)
Within a few minutes, three other trucks showed up as well, almost totally blocking traffic down the street as the crew got to work.
Well, it clearly was going to take a while and there wasn't any way I could take more pictures—they were mostly working underground behind our dumpster, so I'd have really had to get in their way to get anything else. So came inside and passed the rest of the wait time on the phone, catching up on the news with a friend in Kearns, Utah. (You've heard of Kearns if you watched the last Winter Olympics—that's where the speed skating rink is.) We talked until the power finally came back on—just in time for baseball! Bet the PSE crew was glad to finish when they did, too, since while they were working out there, the sky changed from overcast to black and threatening and mere moments after they drove off, the rain let loose.
6:42:54 PM 
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