Day Two-oh-four: Let there be light

So we don't usually talk about the house we're leaving for the new place, but it seems appropriate this time. Like many on this side of the country we were caught by the short-but-potent storm on Friday that knocked power out for millions of customers. We almost never lose power here (lines are mostly buried) and never for more than a few hours. So as the lights winked out around 10pm on Friday we were confident they would return quickly, especially as the storm passed within a few hours.


A complication of losing electricity, of course, has been the unseasonably hot temperatures--a heat index well over 100 degrees on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Friday was still bearable to sleep in our old house as we hoped quick relief. The temperatures inside crept steadily up on Saturday making the third/top floor unbearable for sleeping (it eventually reached at least 92 degrees), so we sought cooler climes on lower floors. To add insult, the new house got its power back around noon on Saturday leading us to joke that we should be sleeping there. 


A second rough night made that seem less fanciful, so on Sunday evening we moved over our mattress and enough kitchen items and food to get us through Monday morning, making 1 July the first night we slept in the new place. We still thought "the power has got to come back on soon" even though we could get nothing like an estimate or news from the power company. With our old house an increasingly unlivable option, we took the decision to move over to the new, in-progress house. 


So today we moved more stuff and got a bathroom fully functioning. We'd already planned to move our furniture and some other bulky items on Saturday, so the storm just moved up our timeline and we're not looking back.


We finally got our power back at 7pm today, almost 4 full days after the storm. What could account for such a long outage, long after all the commercial and residential areas around us got their power back? We talked with someone who accosted a manager from the power company, and he said "Your power is on." When confronted with the reality that we were still lacking electricity, the employee checked and found a blown fuse somewhere and fixed it in minutes. Apparently the company had repaired the storm-damaged connections on Saturday/Sunday and, without checking, thought they had solved the problem despite continuing to get dozens of calls from residents. To quote Chico Marx, "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"


Because we've been in the dark, we'll leave you with this facsimile of our life and post more in a few days about all we've been up to at the new place.