Blackout

Amazing how one’s environment can dominate you. I was awakened today at 11 AM when the power went out. I would later learn this was because my mom forgot to pay the bill. This set all of our battery backups beeping. Now at the time I’m thinking we’ve got a storm rolling through, it might be a short blackout. I’m trying to sleep through it. My wife gets up.

The blackout goes on, and my wife tells me that there’s an estimated restoration in the afternoon. I resolve to try and sleep until then. The beeping has ceased by now. I wake up at 2 and the power has not returned. My wife is in the living room and it is actually 2:30 and she is late for her appointment. So she’s out the door. I go back to my office to take my medications. She calls me and asks me to bring her old phone to her, which I do and we walk back home together. At this point I’m beginning to lean into the blackout, I’m listening to my music and smoking.

Just as I am wandering the house thinking about moving this smoking and music thing to the porch up pulls the power company. He’s going to check out the meter, so I start following him around because what else do I have to do? He’s checking the meter and we’re comparing notes and turns out that it was turned off because of non payment (which my wife had told me earlier during the walk), then when they tried to turn it back on the meter said it didn’t think so. So for the past five hours they’ve been trying to get it to take the signal.

It was just getting a guy out to check the meter. He couldn’t get anyone on the phone. We joked about the smart meter not being so smart after all, and he went to get a new meter off his truck. A few minutes later and power is back. By the time I got my modem, my wife’s computer, my computer and the security system working again the day was over but we still had to go grocery shopping.

I had a lot I wanted to accomplish today but I feel like I was just run over by a horse. Maybe tommorrow will bring better luck.