Power’s Out

Published: June 15, 2021

Sitting at home on a Summertime evening, girls watching TV and I am in my office working on this website when, poof! The power is out!

This is a common occurrence where I live in rural Rhode Island, but it usually happens when there is a strong thunderstorm or if there is a lot of wind. This time there was none of that.

Our power went out at about 9:40PM, without warning. My wife and I went for a walk and noticed a couple of police cars about 1000 yards down the road from my home blocking the road. As we got closer, I noticed that a tall Pine tree had fallen across the road and was now leaning on the power lines. Well, at least we now know the reason for the power outage.

Our Electric Company, National Grid, originally stated on their website that we should have power back by 11:30PM so my wife and I headed back home, lit some candles, used some of the data on our cellphones trying to do some work. Like I said, we live in rural Rhode Island, so the bandwidth on our LTE is not too good with AT&T.

Well, 11:30PM came and went. National Grid’s website had changed and is now saying that our power should be restored by 2:30AM… Damn! That’s a little too late for me seeing that I need to get up at 5:30AM for work. This meant that I was going to need to get some sleep.

The problem that I ran into is that when the power came back on at about 1:15AM, every light in my house came on and I was now wide awake!

After I got up and shut off all of the lights, went to the kitchen and grabbed a quick snack… I WAS STILL WIDE AWAKE!!! My body must think that it was morning, this is a problem. I did everything that I could to try to get to sleep and finally around 2:45ish, I started to doze off when I heard “CHIRP!!!” I thought that I was hearing things. Again I started to doze off and “CHIRP!!!” I know that I didn’t imagine it this time. So I got up and stood in the hallway outside my bedroom to figure out where the noise was coming from when… “CHIRP!!!” It was the smoke detector right above my head! I guess with the power being down for several hours, the battery-backup was drained. Now it is about 3AM and I have to find a 9 volt battery to replace the one that is causing the unit to chirp… (Mind you, we had replaced the battery when we switched to Daylight Savings Time back in April). Luckily, I remembered that I had purchased a pack if 9 volt batteries to use in one of my Rode Microphones. I grabbed the battery and a step-stool and after the smoke detector fought me for a couple of minutes, I got it open, replaced the battery and was back in bed at about 3:30AM.

Well, my alarm went off at 5:30AM and after a couple of hits of the snooze bar, I got up, got ready, and I am now at work. I am dragging quite a bit right now and “bright and chipper” are not part of my job description today, but I will make it through.

#powerout