Wednesday, July 04, 2012

return of civilization

Monday night trucks arrived in our neighborhood.  First the tree people who came from New York State starting moving the big trees off the power lines and power poles.  There was lots of work for them and we all watched in awe as the big buckets on the trucks carefully threaded their way into the tangle of limbs and branches and they carefully cut away the trees.  Next to arrive was help from the Mississippi utility companies.  After the tree people separated the lines from the trees and the trees were cut out of the way, the utility people put up the lines, replaced transformers and checked the power boxes to the homes to make certain they weren't damaged in the transformer explosion (which actually left a giant hole in the road), and they restored our power!

It was odd to find lights on in out of the way places in the house.  We kept switching on lights by habit as we wandered the house in the dark for three days and now the place was lit up like a Christmas tree.  The strange thing was after sweltering for the last three days, the evening was reasonably cool, only in the 80's and I kept the air conditioning turned off!  The A/C is back on now as we are looking at temps to 100+ for the next three days when it will cool off to the 90's.   Now I'm spending my time cleaning up and doing laundry and putting away everything that migrated down from the upstairs of our house during the outage. 

Someone asked me how long I thought civilization would last without power.  My reply was it would only last until the gin and tonics ran out. 

1 comment:

Cinderellen said...

After living 34 years in Oklahoma I have plenty of experience with power outages! What always made me laugh was how automatically we flip on the light switch when entering a room even though we KNOW there is not power!