Power back on after six days without electricity.

What a roller coaster, the power turned on after six days at about 9:00 last night. A broken breaker caused the power outage to our home a five-minute fix for the power company. Six days without power was not too bad, my major concern was that my Mom is coming for Christmas and I was concerned there would not be power for her. After a while you kind of get the hang of things. We were plenty warm we bought an 80,000 BTU wood burning stove this summer so it kept the first and second floor warm the basement was a balmy 50 degrees during the outage.

My regrets were not turning on the dishwasher the night before (didn’t want to waste energy thought I could put four more
dishes in the next day) and not doing the laundry. Early on we retrieved water from our waterfalls to flush the toilets later on we went to the town well for water. In the future I will fill the tubs with water before bad storms. Day three we took our laundry to the laundry mat and on Monday I boiled water to do the dishes I felt much better. Those of you who can empathize with my neat freakishness understand where I am coming from.

The weather reports about the storm were not as accurate as they were in the past, only Jim’s friend Comrade Dave the Socialist from Vermont was privy to what was headed our way. Actually my sister Julie sent me an email a couple of hours before the power went out she must have heard the weather was going to be bad too.

Alexander and Anastasia were troopers during this time, much of my time was spent hauling wood, water and doing things just to survive the outage. Jim charged the DVD players at work so we could watch some movies at nighttime. During the weekend we showered at Jim’s work. Jim showered at work every morning. Jim was dealing with an eye infection throughout this ordeal (still is) so he was not too happy. It was the kind of eye infection that turns his eye bright red and the white of his eye swells up around the pupil.

A special thanks to Ron (yes you), Mary and Dan for you all gave us light throughout the six-day power outage. Ron gave me some candles and flashlights as gifts a long time ago and Mary and Dan gave Anastasia a lantern that helped her find her way in the dark. Jim and I now have to decide if we should buy a generator or not, we have been told that we should expect a power outage about once a year.