The night the lights went out.

Power outages are a fact of life.  We have all lived through them and will do so again.  Some outages are from storm damage, some are from overloaded/overworked equipment, and some are just a fluke.

Ever since we moved to Holly Hill, we seem to suffer with the looooonnnngggg outages.

It started shortly after we moved in, when remanents of Hurricane Ivan moved through the area.  We lost power that evening and it was out for an extended period of time.  If I remember correctly, it was about 18 hours, although my memory could be a little hazy since I spent the night drinking wine and getting to know the new neighbors.

The next significant outage occurred in September of 2008.  A nasty storm rolled through our area and knocked down a tree at the beginning of our neighborhood.  That tree took down a section of wire and a telephone pole with it.  We were without power for 4 days!  

Now we can add last night to the list, although it ranks pretty low.

Our power went off shortly before 6 PM.  I thought it was a bit weird at the time because the storms had not arrived yet.  Thunder was rumbling through the air and the skies were darkening, but it wasn't raining and there wasn't any wind.  I chalked it up to an overload due to the excessive heat and picked up the phone to call Duquesne Light in order to report the outage.  The friendly woman I spoke with said they were showing a significant outage in Ross due to an equipment failure and they were estimating it would be back on by 9.  That was fine, I can deal with that......I figured my refrigerator, which was stocked with food from a shopping trip the day before, would handle that short amount of time.

We went about our evening.  We sat outside and watched the storms roll through.  We listened to my husbands "fire box" (that is what my son calls it) to see what was going on in the area.  That was how we discovered that there wasn't really a significant outage in our area...it seemed to be just us.

Knowing that, I sent the boys off to find dinner.  We could see that McKnight Road had power, so that was the direction that they headed.  They returned with McDonalds and Taco Bell and we had a picnic on our front porch.  It's amazing how much better food tastes when you eat by candlelight.

While the boys were gone, I had called Duquesne Light for an update (did you know they do that?  They give an estimate on the time of restoration as well as a reason for the outage in a computerized voice) and was informed that we were in West View and that our estimate was for an 11:00 PM restoration.  Ok...longer than 9 but I can still deal with that.  After losing a bunch of food in the previous power outages, I tend to get a bit skittish at long power outages, but I figured we would be ok with  a 5 hour outage.

I grew a little bit more concerned after the boys came home and I talked to my parents.  From what they said, there wasn't anything else out around us.  It just seemed to be our little  section, from Rochester Rd down to Siebert, on just one side of Babcock Blvd.  Since the update said that we were in West View, I was a little worried that Duquesne Light got their wires crossed.  So i called back and got one of their agents.  She assured me that they had the information correct and we were still on track to be back on by midnight at the latest.  She said they had small pockets out all over Ross Twp.

We passed the rest of the evening sitting on our front porch and watching the lightning dance through the sky.  I was very glad that the temps had cooled down, but even so, the house was up to 80 degrees!  We had all the windows open but there didn't seem to be a breeze blowing.

At 10 o'clock, we tucked in Captain Chaos with the portable DVD player. We were hoping that he would settle down by watching some of his cartoons.  Well, that little trooper hung in there until about 12:30 when I finally stumbled upon the virtual aquarium portion of his Finding Nemo DVD...that knocked him right out!

At 11:00, when we still didn't have power, I called for an update.  Not a big surprise when the 11:00 estimate had been replaced; however the 6 AM estimate was a bit of a shock.  With that news, we figured action was needed to save the food in the fridge, especially the steaks where were supposed to be our dinner last night.  Luckily, a bag of ice was found and some of the food was packed into a cooler and shipped over to my parents house (this is one of the many benefits of having family close by!).  

I went to bed around 1 AM and tossed and turned.  It was HOT and the sound of the crickets chirping is not relaxing to me.  I'm spoiled and prefer the sound of my A/C blowing!

I had just dropped off to sleep when I was startled awake by what I thought was an alien spacecraft landing on the house.  There were yellow lights flashing all around, a white beam streaking through the darkness, and a very loud noise!  Turns out it was just a BIG Duquesne Light truck......the first one we had seen all night!  I guess they were checking the transformers on the pole.  We have one right outside the house so I guess that is why the spotlight bounced around our bedroom.  That was around 1:45 AM.  Power kicked back on shortly after 2 AM.

A BIG Thank You to the hardworking Duquesne Light employees that were out fixing the problems last night!  I am very happy that we didn't have another 12+hour power outage.

Now I just need to figure out what to do with the 20 pounds of ice that I have left over.  Any ideas?????