The power went out again, today. I was in the middle of doing a blog post, too! Ah, well.
It’s been more than an hour, as I write this. Not sure if I have enough signal to post this. I might have to go outside again.
I did that earlier to try and log into the power company’s app. There are outages reported all over our municipality.
Then I heard the noise.
Long story short, we found four kittens, just a few weeks old, under a junk lawnmower under parts of a collapsed roof. They are in the cat cage in the sun room, with some wet cat food. They are too young for it, but the mama’s all come to the sun room, eventually, so it will be a treat for her!
Hopefully, the mother will accept the soft and comfortable nest they are in, too.
The power went out again, today. I was in the middle of doing a blog post, too! Ah, well.
It’s been more than an hour, as I write this. Not sure if I have enough signal to post this. I might have to go outside again.
I did that earlier to try and log into the power company’s app. There are outages reported all over our municipality.
Then I heard the noise.
Long story short, we found four kittens, just a few weeks old, under a junk lawnmower under parts of a collapsed roof. They are in the cat cage in the sun room, with some wet cat food. They are too young for it, but the mama’s all come to the sun room, eventually, so it will be a treat for her!
Hopefully, the mother will accept the soft and comfortable nest they are in, too.
When the outage start approaching 3 hours, we had a decision do make – except it was already made for us, really. We could get the fire pit going and start cooking lunch, or go into town and get take out.
We’re still under a fire ban (plus, cooking outdoors in this heat would have been brutal), so off to town I went!
As I reached the end of the gravel road, I started seeing large vehicles on the side of the road near the highway. One of them had an empty trailer attached to it. When I got to the stop sign, I could see the equipment it was hauling. A lift on tracks was at one of the power poles, surrounded by several trucks and a crowd of people.
The electric company has been upgrading stuff all over the province for the past year or so, so seeing workers these days is not unusual. Seeing that many, with so many vehicles right in the ditch with the workers (the ditch on that side is wide and flat enough to drive in) suggested this was not part of the maintenance projects.
While driving through our little hamlet, I passed two places that have exterior signs that are lit up, and they were both on. So the power outage clearly didn’t affect things East of the highway.
This is what the WP AI image generator came up with, with only the word “electricity” as a prompt. 😄
When I got to town, I got some gas then stopped at a DQ. I ordered enough for the four of us for two meals, just in case.
On the way home, when I got to where I’d seen the workers, all the vehicles were now mustered on the gravel road side of the highway, and it looked like they were packing up. When I saw I would pass one of the guys, I stopped to ask him about it. He confirmed that they had just finished repairing the damage, and the power would soon be turned back on. I made sure to express my thanks for their work, then headed home. It was only two more miles, but the power was on again before I got there.
While I was in town, I took advantage of having a data signal and messaged with my brother while waiting for the food. When I told him I was in town and why, and he asked about using the BBQ they have us a couple of years back. I told him, the last time I checked, BBQs were also part of the fire ban.
Once home and the computer was back on, I checked the RM website. Our fire pit is not an “approved” fire pit, in that it doesn’t have a screen, but even if it did, we could only have used it between 8pm and 8am. As for the BBQ, it is a propane one, and BBQs and fire pits fueled with propane tanks were still allowed. Which is good to know, should we find ourselves in this situation again. They also just recently lifted a ban on ATVs and off road vehicles.
That explains why I was suddenly seeing so many of them on the trail cams lately!
That might also explain why we suddenly started seeing our vandal doing weird stuff in the driveway cam, too. We didn’t get a break because he was calming down. It was because his preferred method of transportation was temporarily banned.
Tomorrow, we have our planned outage from 9am to 2pm. They are upgrading the entire system so that it can handle more of a load and more people hooked into it. At the same time, they are replacing old poles, cutting away trees and branches from the power lines, and other general maintenance stuff.
I expect our power bills are going to be going up again next fiscal year. When we first got onto the equal payment plan, we were paying less than $300/month. Now, we’re creeping towards $400 a month. Without the equal payment plan, during our first winter here, the bill was over $600 for December and over $700 for January, so we really appreciated being able to get onto the equal payment plan after we lived here for a year! We’re still paying more for electricity every month than we are for our monthly truck payments. The bills have gone up even during years when our overall usage has gone down.
Anyhow.
This sort of thing is why I want to have an actual outdoor kitchen built. This is what we have planned for the structure.
The plan for the back of it is to have a brick or stone series of cooking areas, including an oven and a smoke house, that would be safe to use during dry years like this. It would also be built near the pump shack, so we would have access to the old well, and a simple extension cord from the pump shack can be set up to provide basic power, if we needed it. We originally thought to build it in a completely different area, until we realized it gets standing water during particularly wet springs.
Even if we just had the shelter built, we have old wood burning cook stoves we could set up temporarily. Between being under a roof and the fire being completely enclosed, it would not be included in any fire bans.
We’ll get there. Eventually.
For now, I’m just glad to have the power back on. It means my husband can sleep with his CPAP again.
I’m hoping I have enough data signal to post this!
Yesterday, we got a notification from the electric company that there would be a planned power outage.
Tomorrow.
They’ve been doing a lot of maintenance in the past years or so. This outage, however, is unplanned. I had to wander around outside to find enough signal to open their app and report our outage. I tried looking at their outage map. The pins loaded, but not the map itself.
I was able to get messages from my SIL while I was outside. They are in the middle of a storm. She was able to send me an outage map link that actually loaded. Our area and another just north of us are without power right now.
As I write this, our power has been out for almost 45 minutes. Hopefully, it will be back soon. I really don’t want to get into our alts.
Hopefully, I have enough data signal to post this!
We currently have no power.
Thankfully, we still have the old rotary dial phone hooked up. I had just answered a call for my husband.
From the newly opened pain clinic that is much closer to us!
The call got dropped when the power went out. Then the rotary dial phone started ringing, while I was still holding the dead cordless phone in my hand.
Oh! The power just came back!
Glad it was a short outage. With the temperatures we are having right now, a longer outage can be dangerous.
I tapped away at a blog post this morning. Tried to publish it, but it wouldn’t work. Turned out we lost power while I was writing it.
So I set it aside for later.
Later was a few minutes ago, when I discovered it hadn’t even been saved as draft.
*sigh*
I’ll try to remember what I meant to write, and try again, later.
Well… I guess if I’d been writing it on my computer, I would have known the power was put because my machine would have died as I was typing, so… I’ll take the W for that, at least. 😄
The Re-Farmer
Update: oh!!! I just realized why it didn’t save to draft! My phone published it on its own!
While the power was out, my husband was able to get a weak data signal from the living room on his tablet, so he was able to report our outage to the electric company and check the status of things. The power went out at about 8:30am, and we were expected to get it back around 11:30am.
With no electricity for that length of time, we considered firing up the BBQ or getting the fire pit going to make breakfast. After checking the budget, however, we decided to be lazy. We had a couple of water jugs that needed refilling (we have 4 of these 18.9L jugs, and try to make sure they get refilled when 2 are empty and dry), which meant a trip into town. If they had power, of course. We decided we could afford to get some take out, rather than opening the fridge with no power and losing the cold.
One of my daughters came along with me, with their own shopping list. I knew we had lost power during the night, which must have been a problem for my older daughter! She would have been working on commissions on her computer. The power only flickered, however. Enough to have the garage cam reset itself and be resting in its default position – which is how I knew the power had gone out during the night – but not enough to shut down her computer. My husband didn’t mention having problems with his CPAP, either, so that was good.
As we were leaving and stopped on the driveway while my daughter closed the gate behind us, one of our neighbours was driving by and stopped to talk. He told us the power outage was quite extensive, ranging from the town my mother lives in, to the next large town to the north of us. He had heard the power was expected to return by 11am, though, which was a bit sooner than what my husband had found.
While driving to town, my daughter and I considered our options, should they be without power, too. Happily, they were completely unaffected. Which makes sense. The transformer system runs north and south along the main highways, not east and west, so what affected us would be a different branch of the system than any towns to the east of us.
We hit the grocery store first and I did our refills while my daughter did her shopping. Since we were there, I picked up a couple other things, too – like more paper towels! Leyendecker may not be eating, but clearly he’s drinking, and still doesn’t seem to have much bladder control. We’re going through a lot of paper towels cleaning up, then sanitizing, after him. Yes, we should be using rags, but somehow, they’ve all disappeared! We didn’t have a lot, anyhow.
We then decided to go to a Greek place for take out. My husband and I went there once, shortly after we moved here and he was still more mobile. They have gyros, which none of us have had in years. Personally, I’d love to have a good Donair, but the best place we’ve ever had them was in Victoria, BC, before we had children, and I don’t even know if the place exists anymore. Still, the gyros here are quite good.
Since we had stuff for the refrigerator in the car, my daughter stayed in it with the engine running and the AC going, as it was so hot and muggy already. While waiting for the gyros to be made, I realized they also had deep fried pickles – something else we haven’t had in years! So I got an order of those, too. 😊
While I was there, my daughter got a message from my husband that the power was back. It was out for only 2 hours! That’s the longest we’ve been without power since moving out here, but I’m not complaining at all. That was a very fast return.
So we had a treat for the day. Except my older daughter, who’s in bed for the day. It’ll be “breakfast” for her, when she gets up for the night.
One the way home, I remembered to stop to get the mail, and picked up these.
The couplings are in! We can finally try and fix that water pipe to the garden tap. I really hope this works, because I’d hate to have to dig up the entire line.
It’s going to be a challenge just to dig around where the crack is, there are so many roots around the pipe. From what I can tell, the roots are small enough I should be able to cut through them with a spade or loppers.
My other thought is, what to use to cut the pipe itself. All our cutting tools are designed to cut wood, not PVC pipe. I’m sure I’ve got something I can use, though. The main thing is digging enough space around it to have room for a cutting tool to work without biting into the soil. We do have a pipe cutter, but it’s for cutting much smaller copper pipe, not something like this.
Yesterday, my daughter juiced the cherries we picked, and the pulp has been hanging to drain in the cat free zone overnight. We’ve got a total of 5 cups of juice. A basic jelly recipe is for 3 1/2 cups. The remaining juice isn’t worth doing a second batch, so I’ll make a syrup with that. We plan to actually water bath can the jelly, so it will be shelf stable. With cooking the jelly, preparing the jars, then using the water bath canner, plus making the syrup, we’re looking at a lot of time over a hot stove, on a hot and muggy day. My daughter and I decided to wait until things start to cool down.
All the more reason to have an outdoor kitchen!
Hot and muggy though it may be, I think I’ll go out and see if I can fix the water pipe! I’m really eager to see if it’ll work. I’m already thinking ahead to fixing the support post the tap it attached to, which is rotting at its base, and bringing over the double laundry sink we found in the shed, to set up a vegetable washing station.
I never thought I’d ever get so excited about fixing a pipe. 😄
I will, however, have to pry Question off my shoulder. She’s been napping on me since I sat down at the computer!
I am standing in our driveway right now, where I can get a decent data signal. At least enough to do text.
As I write this, we have been without power for about half an hour or more. We had storms blow past us, and a lot of rain last night. I could tell we lost power, at least briefly, while I was asleep. Right now, things are pleasant, but from the weather radar, the city is being hit with a severe storm at this very moment. Which likely explains our power outage.
The Re-Farmer 