Monday, April 24, early in the morning, there was that sound ... "shvooom" then silence. Everything in the house had powered off. It only lasted a moment, then "shvoom" and things powered up again. Lots of beeping. A grinding sound from the ice maker. The washing machine was agitating again on it's own. The clothes dryer required a manual restart. My laptop re-booted, but still needed a nudge to bring up the monitor. The older desktop computer was off, and I knew it's restart would probably take 10 minutes. It doesn't like not being turned off correctly.
I moved to the microwave and hit the required buttons ... clock, the numbers for the correct time, clock again. At least it's easy. Next up, resetting the stove. Let's see ... clock, start, 3 for a.m., now input the time, now clock again and done.... and "shvooom". Really? Again? I'm glad I hadn't even tried to turn on the desktop. I was heading out for a little while, and hoped things would be back on when I got back. "Shvoom" ... the power was on. That was good, as since Grayson changed out the garage door opener I'm not sure how to detach it and open manually to get the car out.
When I got back a while later, the microwave was blinking. I'd reset the clock there before I left (again) so the power had shut-off at least one more time while I was gone. It continued to happed a few more times during the day. Once, while Cooper was on the treadmill running at a good speed. That is NOT a good time to have things come to a sudden stop. Luckily he was able to catch himself without injury. There in the home gym, the elliptical and the recumbent bike aren't plugged in, so even without electricity, one could work out with them. Of course normally we have the television keeping us entertained, and a fan blowing to keep us cool.
I remember the tragedy of a power outage when the kids were younger. "What can we do?" I think I even had a list of things (play a board game, battery powered games ~ this was when the handheld Nintendo devices were popular. Now, everyone has an iphone, hopefully fully charged. Read a book, play ping pong, take a nap, play outside. This would also be impacted by the time of day (or night rather ... candles or flashlights needed?) and temperature (no a/c, thermostat) could be a complication with any extended outage.
The off/ons continued Tuesday. Social media can help determine how widespread the issue is. This time, it seemed to just be our little neighborhood loop. Someone said they had made a call to Rocky Mountain Power to make sure they were aware and looking into the issue. Every time the power would cycle, the router would take several minutes to get back online. Thank goodness for cell service. It was also a perfectly nice day weather-wise. Not to hot, not too cold ... which made us wonder WHAT was going on as wind/snow/heat wasn't part of the problem.
I was glad it was a "make" day for sourdough, as this would have made baking difficult (I did do some baking on Tuesday and had to turn the oven back on once after an outage to finish up my bread). The ice maker had been malfunctioning, and as I heard it "griiiind" every time it powered back up, I rather hoped this might kick-start it back into functioning (limited success here, it did start pouring water in, I got a huge hunk of ice). It's funny to notice the random little things ... like the heated toilet seat. So spoiled! You never know the joy of a toasty tushy until it's turned off. The master shower had recently been renovated and these power stops and starts screwed something up with it. Sometimes we can get too technical ... there are no knobs to turn the water on manually! It was able to get back in business after being unplugged for a bit.
While this was really a minor inconvenience, it was annoying. I went ahead and restarted my computer and was writing an email to Gray to give him an update and 'schvooom' ... oh, I hope it had auto-saved my email!
Power ... it's powerful. Happy that 99% of the time it's smooth sailing.
No comments:
Post a Comment