At about 7:30 PM yesterday, a lightning bolt cooked our end of the neighborhood. It sounded like it hit our chimney -- the roof sounded like it was splitting, things sparked -- but there's no sign of a hit, and the bolt seems to have struck only outside, a few yards away.
It took out the transformer on our corner, and the absolutely awesome crew from Santee Cooper was out there replacing it by 10 PM. A slightly more cynical friend reminded me that they were probably loving the overtime, and I'm sure that's true, but it was a l-o-o-ong hard day for those guys, storms and similar strikes all over the place. It took 3 huge trucks, two with cherry-pickers. I took the picture at close to 11PM, from the front porch, where we stood and watched, having read with booklights for 3 hours and not wanting to run down any more batteries.
By the way, it made me decide to get more booklights that take ordinary AA batteries from now on. I have a charger for rechargeable batteries. Most booklights that they sell now use those expensive, non-rechargeable, little specialty disc batteries. I've got one light that's out of commission because I carefully opened it, got the battery number, bought one, got it home, and found that the little %@$-d needs TWO of the bleeping things.
We still had a fried modem and no cable, which took another day to fix. I spent the day reading and -- I amaze myself! -- sewing. I loathe needles and thread but it was an undeniable shoutout from God/The Universe/Opportunity, to do several annoying clothes-mending jobs that have sitting for years.
It could have been a lot worse.
4 comments:
Sounds as though you made the most of your time!
Almost like going camping to the 1930s, isn't it? And I agree with Catherine; it sounds like you made pretty good lemonade out of those lemons.
Electrical outages used to be routine here at Ft. Harrington, occasionally even longer than 24 hours -- it was out for three straight days over one Thanksgiving shortly after we moved up here. I say "used to be" because the power grid seems to have gotten much more robust over the past few years. When our gasoline-powered generator died last year, we didn't replace it.
I hope Scooter was okay during the pyrotechnics!
PS - Super photo!
We had the same experience when we had a powerline snap in incredibly cold weather winter before last, and when the transformer on the pole outside our house caught on fire another time. NB Power may be a train wreck in a number of ways, but by god their after-hours tech response is amazing.
I've just discovered that the app I use to notify me of new blog posts on blogs I follow was malfunctioning and just informed me of about 40 new posts I haven't read or responded to, so I have some catch-up reading to do - on this blog as well as others. Looking forward to it!
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