We arrived back at the house after most of the day spent in Temple for two doctor’s appointments for me to discover we were without power.

This wasn’t a huge problem EXCEPT, we haven’t gotten the door installed in the garage yet, so our only entrance and exit is through powered garage doors.  When the doors are down, they are locked.  With no power, we don’t get the doors up.  Why is this a problem?  We put the dogs in the garage to keep them out of the weather (rain was expected and did fall) while we were gone.  They were now trapped until power was restored.  Fortunately, they had plenty of water and had been fed and walked before we left.  It was relatively cool yesterday — mid-80s.

We went in the house, powered down the computers (UPS units were still beeping, so power hadn’t been off long), turned off the A/C units, and opened a window upstairs and a door downstairs to create what draft we could.  About an hour later, power came back on, and hubby opened the garage doors and left to pick some items up at the store.  I checked a phone message and listened to a recorded message from the city about a water main break and an admonition to not water the yard and to boil water until further notice.

While hubby was gone to the store, I went out to hook the dogs up on their chains and make sure they were comfortable.  The A/C units turned off while I was out there, but I didn’t think anything of that until I tried to apply power to the box fan we use to help the dogs (especially our elderly Dazzle) stay cool.  It wouldn’t come on.  That’s when I got suspicious.  Sure enough, the power had gone off again.  I was thankful we had power long enough to get the dogs out.  They would have been ok, but we would have been worried about them.

This was between 3:45 and 4:00 pm.  Power did not come on until 9:35pm.  In the interim, we grew concerned about the refrigerator — it would be fine for a couple of hours, but if the power didn’t come back on, well, you can imagine.

We wanted to get the generator out of the garage, but hubby hadn’t opened all the doors all the way.  I reminded hubby about the emergency pulls on each door that would allow them to be used manually.  We opened the doors, pulled everything out of the third bay, and wheeled the 7kw generator out.  Once we remembered where the switch to turn on the gas was, the generator started right up.  We shut it down, poured in about 7 gallons of gas, and positioned it by the back door.  We plugged the refrigerator in, and, since we had plenty of juice, hubby hooked up his satellite TV, a light, and the box fan.  Thankfully, we have a gas stove (and matches since the piezoelectric starters didn’t have power to light the burner), so cooking dinner was no problem.

Not unexpectedly, our neighbor came over about 8 to ask if we were going to run the generator all night.  We assured him it would be turned off by 10 (campground rules, if you didn’t know).  He kept saying he wondered if we didn’t pay our electric bill (even though he didn’t have power, either).  I think he was trying to tell a joke.  Then we chatted a little about The Hamptons, and after getting assured once again that we weren’t going to run the generator all night, he returned home.  He’s been better the last few months — almost friendly.  I hope he’s beginning to understand we aren’t here to ruin his life.

He doesn’t like dogs.  He can’t figure out why we have all this stuff.  But I don’t think he’s harped on us trying to flood him out for several months now, so maybe we’re making progress.  If we can discuss a neutral topic, he’s quite interesting to talk to.

I’m still boiling water.  We had a case or two of bottled water, and we’ve been drinking that.  It’s a good opportunity to get fresh disaster supplies set in.  While the garage doors were closed, hubby realized all his kerosene lanterns were in the garage — behind locked doors.  He’s since picked out four to keep in our emergency shelter under the back stairs.  He also stocked up on lamp oil.

We turned off the generator at 9:30 pm last night, and power was restored at 9:35 pm.  We think an earlier storm dropped tree branches on a power line a couple blocks away.