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      Friday, September 09, 2011


otherstuff
07:44 AM - 09/09/2011

The topic: The power went out

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Yesterday afternoon at 3:38.  I was in the kitchen dicing, slicing and cutting up a bunch of fresh bell pepper’s I’d picked from my plants for freezing. 

Of course, the first thing my mind goes to is “did I pay the bill?”...think about it, yeah, I did, actually paid it before it was even a day late, yay me. So, that’s not it. Brian was home and he came and sat by me while I worked.  After a half hour, the power still wasn’t on.  I started a search for an AM radio.  I found an emergency crank/solar/battery operated radio that I’d bought years ago from Woot.com.  Found a station and set it there.  The outage was county wide.  

One of the reports from an SDG&E spokesperson said that a line was “severed”.  Poor choice of words so close to 9/11. The root cause was announced last night.

“The outage was started after an Arizona Public Service utility employee performed a procedure on the North Gila-Hassayampa transmission line near Yuma, Ariz., that resulted in a major outage to Southern California.”

Over five million people were affected.

We had barbequed hot dogs for dinner.  I found my package of battery tea lights I’d gotten at CostCo last year and started placing them around the house and in the bathrooms.  Around 8:30 I got most of the cats in with the help of a flashlight. Brian was snoozing on the sofa.  I looked around and called to him “you should really come see this, you’ll most likely never have this opportunity again. There are no lights, just the moon and stars.” 

He came out and looked around and went over to the swing.  I joined him and we talked about how clear the sky was, how bright the moon.  And then, someplace in the neighborhood, someone started shooting off fireworks.  Not the loud bangers that adolescent males seem to love so much, the ones that annoy the hell out of dogs and us senior folk, but the colorful big ones.  We had a front row seat.  We could hear cheers in the distance as they exploded blooms of color in the sky.  It was really nice. That lasted about a half hour, then we walked down by the pool, sat on the steps with our feet in the water and laid back on the cement, looking at the night sky.  Saw one satellite go by, Brian remembered it from when we used to go out, he said it goes by about 9:00 every night, same area of the sky. 

We hung out there for a while more, then got the remaining cats inside and fell asleep in front of the television.  Which we weren’t watching because, ahem, there was no power.  The radio was on and we dozed listening to the callers reporting in.  “Yes, we’ve got power!”  I turned it off around 10:30 and fell asleep.  At 1:55AM, the power came back on.  First thing I did was turn the catcam computer back on, then turned down the fans, turned off the television (it was on when the power stopped), turned off all of the battery candles and went to bed. Brian was already there.  *lol*

All in all, it was a nice evening. Very relaxing.


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lisaviolet is seventy something, married with no kids, takes care of lots of cats, likes taking photographs, loves Southern California weather and spends altogether too much time avoiding her responsibilities.

In her spare time, she makes pretty things to sell in her store.

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