Boom Boom, Out Go the Lights

I was planning on doing a post about the great coaching lesson I had on Wednesday night. I will probably get to that at some point in the future. But sometime around 4:30 PM on Thursday, I’m watching the weather radar and there is this strong band of stuff headed right for us.

Sky gets dark and the wind picks up and suddenly the lights go out, then come back on, then go out, then come back on and finally die. And not just the lights but all the things we take for granted until the power no longer works. The sump pump backup battery starts beeping to tell me the power had gone out so I have to head to the basement to silence the alarm so it doesn’t drive us crazy.

Good thing for cell phones with data plans so I reported the outage and then we just waited to hear more. Sometimes, the power comes right back on. Not this time. Guessing lots of people were headed home from work so we just watched the outage map grow and grow as more people reported in. After an hour, the power company sends out an email talking about “significant damage” and not being able to give an estimate as to when power would be restored.

The good things was that the storms ushered in lower temperatures so we could open the windows and not broil in the house. The bad news was that it let in the humidity and bad air that was outside. Spent lots of time reading and finishing the latest puzzle. Sometime around 10 PM, the power company issued another memo bringing up the possibility of “days without power” and suggesting we all have “backup plans”.

Well, that’s not good. Knowing it was going to be 90 on Friday, my mind starts racing for possible solutions. Do we book a hotel now or wait until tomorrow? If we do book, how many days should we plan for? Scanned the internet to check on availability and it seemed good enough to wait. Had also been planning to go to an instant care place to check on the cough that won’t go away. Even looked up how long food in a freezer should be kept because we typically keep a lot of seafood in the freezer.

At the same time, I was putting out the positive vibes and told my wife, the power would likely be restored at 3AM. Tried to sleep but too much was running through my head and the cough got worse so there was not much sleep to be had. A couple of times, I heard a vehicle and I convinced myself they were the power company trucks out to fix things since the trucks do sound different than regular cars. I was checking the outage maps and noticed there were fewer places around us without power so all looked hopeful.

And the good news is I was awakened by the power coming back on at 4:30 AM. The sump pump backup battery started to beep because I had silenced the alarm and now power was back and the alarm shouldn’t be silenced. That thing is picky.

The only food casualty was some chicken we had left in the refrigerator and had planned to eat last night. Might have still been good but decided not to take the chance.

So why didn’t I do this post yesterday? Well the power came back but the internet was still down. Could have done something on the phone but I’m too old to be typing with thumbs. I need a real keyboard. When we first reported it (online), we got the typical IT troubleshooting response about “checking to make sure all cables were plugged in”.

Later, they finally realized that it was a wider outage so the message changed when went back to the site. My wife actually had something she needed to finish up and we couldn’t make the hot sport work so she went to a coffee shop. She told me it was jammed with people in the same situation so lots of people on zoom meetings trying to talk over everyone else.

The internet did come back to life early in the afternoon but we had plans for Friday night (more on that later). It was an interesting couple of days. We were lucky though because there are still thousands of people without power.

I did get to the minute clinic. At first, the nurse was telling me that they don’t like to give out antibiotics but then she listened to my lungs and heard some stuff that wasn’t great. So I’m now on an antibiotic and hoping it helps.