Caught in the Power Outage

Early Sunday afternoon, after returning from church and getting one of those large rotisserie chickens from Kroger on the way home, our power went off. Heavy winds had knocked down wires up on Rt 122, and when we used the cell phone to call AEP, we were told the power could not be restored before Tuesday or Wednesday night around midnight.

Oh, boy. At least no one here was sick, nor did we have to go to work, and our kids are grown and moved away, but there were measures to take, certainly.

Thank heavens for cooked chicken, that took care of any immediate problem. Dick lit the gas fireplace, so we had heat. He took his ATV down to the river and filled two large storage bins with river water so we could flush. We have a propane stove, so knew we could light the burners and be able to heat up some crockpot chicken from Saturday. (We'll be cackling like chickens ourselves any day now!).

We kept the fridge closed as much as possible, also the freezer compartment AND the chest freezer out in the garage. When Dick went to start the generator, he discovered a missing piece, something he'd intended to replace BEFORE needing the auxilliary power...sure! Since it was Sunday afternoon, he had to wait until Monday morning for the place to open for the part. The generator kept the fridge and freezers going.

We lit candles and old fashioned oil lanterns we often use on the back deck in the summer.

We'd not had a power outage extending beyond a few hours before, so we were only semi-prepared.

Looking at each other by Sunday evening, we laughed a bit. No TV, no computer, no ham radio, not enough light to read comfortably...I went to the hall closet and took down a turntable Scrabble set I'd bought maybe two or three years ago, that we hadn't even opened. The directions were hard to read by oil lamp, but we remembered the basics, and set both oil lamps up, along with a few candles, so we could play.

Did the writer (me) win? Or the great outdoorsman? Yeah, Mr. Competition managed to utilize nearly all of the double word, triple letter squares and won. We'll have to turn this into a Sunday evening event (with lights) so the competition can continue.

We were lucky; the power was restored by Monday night. Just two days of no power, candles in the bathrooms, flushing with river water, actual conversations with each other (!), and chicken, lots of chicken. I was surprised to learn how much I've come to depend upon the microwave, but heck, you can heat just about anything on top of the stove. And if we'd not had a gas stove, Dick would have dug out his camping stove. He DID get the camp lantern out by Monday, giving us more light than we'd had.

Now, friends from our church who lost power checked into a local motel and their kids delighted in swimming in their warm pool, as well as eating in a nearby Applebee's. So we certainly had options, had the outage gone on. Today's paper tells us that some Roanoke Valley folks may not get power before tomorrow night (Thursday) or even later, and some have had to move into shelters.

Ah, but with the phones out, we also missed many, many political calls prior to Tuesday's primary election. Gosh, too bad that.