Hot Time in the Hot Town

At 7:45 A.M. or so, our electricity went out on Sunday. I woke up at 8:00 because there was a weird beeping sound that was NOT my alarm. I looked at my clock radio to see what time it was, and there was nothing displayed. Uh, oh. I jumped up and looked around the house to find the irritating beep and found it on the house alarm keypad. It was telling me that the door ring tones weren't working. Yup...nothing was working if it needed electricity. This is bad.

At the time, it was only 90 degrees outside. But, I knew that the whole week the temperatures had been topping out at 110 degrees and today wouldn't be any different. Immediately, I went to my computer---doh! So, I got the iPad. Oops...no WiFi. But....CoolGuy is on it. He set up a little personal hotspot on my phone so that I can have WiFi on the iPad when I'm not at home or somewhere else with it. We got rid of the 3G connection to save money; plus I rarely use the iPad where there isn't a connection for me.

Well, the power company website was telling me that I was part of power outage with nearly 3000 other lucky customers and we might have it back on by 12:30. Eek!! That was four hours away! Well, I decided to just get ready and go to church early. So, I did everything I could that didn't need electricity (gas water heater, I love you...) and ate my cereal, and put my hair up in a French twist. Luckily, I'd just had my bangs trimmed, so they look okay without the curling iron. I fluffed them up a bit and hair-sprayed them in place.

It really wasn't too bad in our house. We have a large tree in our back yard that shades the house really well, and the garage takes up most of the front. So, as long as one stayed out of the garage, the rest of the house stayed quite cool. By 10:00 A.M. it was up to 100 already, according to the thermometer on the patio. So, I decided I'd just leave for church and hang out there until I needed to start the prelude music at 10:45. CoolGuy got back from his morning motorcycle ride just as I was leaving, and told me there were no traffic lights in the intersections near our house, either. Hmmm...

I took the circuitous route to the church, and sure enough, the markets and gas stations in a little business development near us were all closed, too. No one parked at McDonald's! Weird....So, when I arrived at the church (which is between our house and these stores) I was delighted to find that the building DID have power. Apparently the circuits that were affected hopscotched around the neighborhood. As the congregation arrived, we all asked, "Do you have electricity?" before we even said hello. About half did and half didn't. My neighbor across the street did---we didn't! Weird...

So, we had our church meetings, and midway through, the bishop announced that the power company was now predicting it might take until 5:00 P.M. to get the mess fixed, so the church would stay open and available for anyone who might need a cool place to be. And, we should contact our neighbors who might be overheated at their houses to, please, come here and we'd have a few rooms available to just hang out.

This is one of the Sundays when having a three-hour meeting block paid off! We finished up about 2:00 P.M. and I decided to go home and see how CoolGuy was faring. Was he still "cool?" I figured he'd been floating in the pool. That was my plan! But, when I walked into the house, it was still remarkably cool-ish. Seriously...I'm sure that four more hours of no AC would have put an end to that, but as I was making myself a peanut butter sandwich aound 2:45, I heard a little click, and a hum, and the refrigerator purred to life right behind me. Then, about 10 minutes later, the air conditioner kicked in and started blowing gently from the vent above my head. Ahhhh....modern life! It's not appreciated until you lose it. (Actually, I appreciate it all the time. I doubt I'd have been hardy enough to live here in the Mojave before they'd created a way to cool off houses.)

Turns out a driver had either fallen asleep, or was impaired, and had driven (apparently at quite a high speed) into a big old power pole and broke it right off! Took out the fence in the front yard of the people's house, too. Thanks, dude! But we all survived, and I hope it doesn't happen again this year.