Salutations™!!
So, this is Friday’s post, which I’m writing on Sunday. Full disclosure, sometimes I write my posts in advance and sometimes I wait to see what happens in my day. Well, I was getting through the day on Friday and at 547p, the power disappeared from my house. The weird thing is, Ma ‘Rents didn’t lose power, nor did my neighbors to the south of me. Oddly enough, the neighbors to my west did lose power, but the street lights (mostly) were still on in front of their houses. The duplex farm to the north of me also lost power. When I looked on the Duke Energy website, it showed my house and said “Customers Affected: 1” Then another notice that showed the duplex farm as 66 affected and a third triangle with 47 affected.
I can’t sleep without my CPAP and without power, my CPAP is useless. Let’s just say my night was no fun. We could have gone to my parents’ house but we thought it surely would be on soon. I continuously texted “STATUS” to Duke Energy and all they would say is that there is an outage and that they were investigating it. I’m telling you, Dear Reader, no one was out investigating this. I can also tell you that when we found out what it was that caused it the next day, there certainly was no one investigating it overnight.
When I said earlier that most of the street lights were on in front of my western neighbors, a tree had fallen on one of the light poles and knocked out a transformer. Now, here’s the thing about that… I was listening to Chess, yes that ill-fated musical starring Murray Head and featured the song “One Night in Bangkok,” when the power flickered around 520p and there was a big BOOM! It was loud. But, everything still worked, other than the internet having to reset itself. I figured it was a transformer because of the sound. But, everything stayed on until about 30 minutes later. So I don’t know what was going on.
So, the night went on and nothing changed. The BCPF got inventive and put an LED flashlight into one of the gallon jugs that the distilled water for my CPAP comes in. It acts as a lantern and disperses light really well. That was pretty awesome. She’s pretty awesome, too.
(don’t be disoriented Dear Reader… I’m going to whisk us into the future, here)
So, Saturday, we get up, without showers and without sleep (she can’t sleep when I’m hacking and gurgling all night from apnea), go out to start our day. We see the tree laying across the downed pole and figured that is the cause (we didn’t see it the night before) and a tree service working on it.
At breakfast, I tried the STATUS texts again and it did give me a different message. This was actually saying they were going to update me after the assessed the damage. I knew they weren’t checking it all night.
Then it said that the estimated time for power to be on would be 730p. Then I got another about an hour later that said it would be 1130p. We were at Underdog Records for the Clay Howard album release show and we decided we’d go on home to see what was going on and get ready for Willows. We came down our street and there were no utility trucks but we could see trees in the yard of the house that had it happen. We pull into our driveway and the outside light is on and we are in business!!!
So, that’s why Dear Reader that my Friday post was delayed until today. I know it really doesn’t matter if I post every single day but it does to me. You may return to your present day and time, now. Oh, and be warned that tomorrow’s post will also be from the future…
Until tomorrow, stop time traveling…
John Connor out!
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“If it weren’t for electricity, we’d all be watching television by candlelight.” – George Gobel