Friday night, all was going well until a huge thunderstorm crept up on us. I thought it wasn't supposed to rain in Los Angeles, but boy has that notion been disproving itself lately! Rain has been coming down in sheets. Unfortunately, some lightning came down with it, and took out the power in a grid of about 1,000 houses, of which ours was one.
No power all night. This was no real problem, after all at night it's lights out and sleep anyway. But as the outage dragged on into Saturday, it started to get a little annoying. Luckily my mom has kept us supplied with an assortment of wind-up emergency items, such as a radio. (Battery operated gear would do me little good, as I'd never remember to change the batteries!) At one point during the day, I asked my wife if she'd cut my hair, and she said "Sure!" Then we realized that "We need power for the clippers." Oops.
Virtually every time I went into our candle-lit cave of a bathroom, I'd switch up the light switch, waiting for some decent light to shave or shower by. Oops.
But hey, having no power is no problem, I'll just write some more of my new book on my laptop. Except it wasn't charged. Oops. My wife was more fortunate- sort of. Her laptop was charged and ready to go, so she was all set to fire up and write her online journal. One problem. She had a perfectly functional laptop, but no power means no DSL modem, no wireless router, no Internet. Oops. We could have used a simple modem line since the phone powers itself, but in our high-speed, broadband, wireless home we've shunned the lowly 56k and never bothered with access numbers. Oops.
So we called the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. First the word was it would take about 2 hours to restore the power. 2 hours passed in blissful darkness. We called again and the answer was 6 hours. Later we called again, and the answer was about 12 hours. So we stopped calling, before they pushed it ahead the whole weekend. My wife took the content of our no longer frozen freezer, and drove it to civilization, IE: a friend's house with a working freezer.
We had a party to go to at a friend's house in Laguna Nigel, so we drove down. Before arriving, we checked into a hotel in nearby Costa Mesa, so that after attending the party, we wouldn't have to drive back home late at night in the rain, and so we'd have the added benefit of... *gasp*, electricity! What a wonderful thing, and to think, how much we've taken it for granted.
As I write this, it's 9am Sunday morning, (3 day weekend by the way!) and we're both cooped up in our hotel room enjoying the benefits of electricity before heading out. I've gotten to finish writing a few chapters of my book. I had to take the opportunity to post to my Zaptoons blog- who knows if we'll have power or not when we get home. Come to think of it, why go home to uncertain electronic conditions? Think we'll stay here a while!
