Also known as “Adventures in Camping in Your Own Home.”
We had a storm come through on Sunday afternoon with straight ahead winds of up to 80 miles an hour. Wider than the derecho that took down our electric drop and toppled an apple tree which I have not yet had the heart to cut down because it’s still alive, although not thriving. We watched the winds bend the trees, and my wife said the house was shaking, although I did not feel that. She and my youngest continued to watch it, and I went back to my desk, and out went the lights.
We’re kind of used to short outages, and we had one for a couple of hours a couple years back, but this one was different.
City Utilities working to restore power to Springfield after damaging storm
(We’re not on City Utilities; we have an electric co-op.)
Earlier this year, a strong set of storms knocked out power to places in the northern reaches of the area for a week, and so I thought this time might be different. And it was. It turns out to have been 42 hours, two nights and a day and a half, without power. Of course, we did not know that then.
So our little camping-at-home adventure began.
How did we do?
Well, we had plenty of drinking water laid in (as we’re on a well, when we do not have electricity, we do not have running water, either). We had to ration flushes, which left the house smelling a bit like a gas station.
We had plenty of food, and we went out to eat a couple or three times.
We had a great opportunity to change the water filters–which is generally not a pain, but it had been a while–as we drained all water in the lines to flush toilets.
We had a great opportunity to defrost our freezer. We’ve not gotten it low enough on contents that we could put it in our other freezers for a couple of hours on a summer day. Instead, we got the chance to give the contents of our warming refrigerator to a friend with a large family who could always use extra comestibles–which includes a full gallon of milk and 24-pack of eggs fresh from Sam’s Club. And we took meat and whatnot from our warming freezer to the food bank this morning where they passed it out immediately to customers. And now we have a fresh and clean freezer. Just think that if we had defrosted it sometime in the responsible past, it might not have held until the day the food bank was open.
I read a little in the evenings by lantern light. We didn’t use candles–we have plenty of little LED lanterns that provide plenty of light for reading or writing. I carried a flashlight in my pocket because Nogglestead is dark at night; interior rooms where we live and the corridor mostly lack windows, and the nights were moonless. I remember spending the night we bought the home here, and I remember it as having been very dark indeed. We must have had the electricity turned on the next day–even on dark nights, ambient light from our security lights outside make it pretty easy to move about, but the last two days I’ve had a flashlight in my pocket.

On Monday, we went and helped a friend who had limbs of her maple tree across a driveway. After a quick bath in the pool, I went to the gym. Then, the youngest and I went to lunch and then to Relics for gift shopping. On each trip out, we hoped to return to lights beside the garage doors, but no such luck.
So, for me, it was a vacation. I work from home, and all of my work stuff is in my office. I could have schlepped to a coffee shop and plugged in a laptop and turned on my phone’s hotspot (which rapidly drains my battery, so I’d have to jack in the phone, too). But I had nothing that pressing, and I wanted to wait to see if the power would come on any minute now.
How did the rest of the family do? Well, they became a bit restive as they did on our trip to Big Cedar this year. They complained about the power being out a lot. The oldest went out several times and kept busy, but the youngest is very electronics oriented, so he would run his phone out of energy and be at a loss. My beautiful wife got restive at spots, mostly at bedtime when the household temperature was 80 degrees or so. She did get a chance to work off-site, which got her into air conditioning and allowed her to bring a bounty of power banks home.
Power came back this morning as we were on our way to the food bank, and when we came home, it took time to put things back together. I’d left the water off so that I could make sure the filter housings weren’t dripping, so I got them going, we got the washing machine and dishwasher spinning, we got the freezer out for an official defrosting (and not just leaking onto the floor behind the wet bar), and I got back to work.
So some lessons learned: We might consider getting some rain barrels. They would help with watering plants in the dry part of summer and offer toilet flushing when the power is out. We’re not considering a generator as our need for it is yet unproven–we’ve lost power for probably fifty or sixty hours total since we’ve lived here, and that’s been almost sixteen years. But if we start to see decline in power reliability, we’ll reconsider.
Also, I recently questioned whether declining quality of public works led to street problems. Do I think that declining electrical infrastructure might be a factor in the recent outages? Perhaps. I mean, there are more lines going more places, and they can’t be arsed to bury them, but: From our drives around the area after both storms, it was clear that a lot of trees completely blew over. That is, when caught in the wind, the trees just toppled, leaving bunched root balls exposed. And in the case of our friend, it was a maple tree that split, and they are notorious for that–but they grow fast, so they’re popular with builders and subdivision developers. So I cannot help but wonder if these problems are caused by non-native trees planted in development which are not suited to break deeply into the clay soil in these parts, and now the trees are reaching an age and height where they are more prone to toppling.
But I can’t be arsed to find out.
So look forward to resumption of regular book and movie reports and other twee asides.