Electricity Woes

Two weeks ago our electricity went out on Saturday. About an hour after it had come on, while I was putting the kids to bed, we had a blackout. I didn't think anything of it - that happens constantly - until I looked out the window and saw that streetlight across the street, still glowing brightly. The people across the street have their own transformer, and so they are often spared the outages the rest of us suffer.

On Wednesday night when the power came on, ours worked. (This was after a couple of nights of power that wasn't even half-strength.) Then this past Saturday, the same thing happened. It's still out now. Every night the power comes on (and there's been a lot), and every night we don't have any. We watch that cheery glow from across the street and try not to be consumed with jealousy.

This morning the city power was still on when we came to school (and it's still on now). I'm running the AC in my classroom because of course, as soon as we go on generator (we're still on the backup generator), I'll have to turn the AC off again. It's nice to get a little chill in the room before the kids get here.

A couple of weeks ago there was a pole down behind our school. (This was classic - people were burning trash around the bottom of the electrical/telephone pole. Finally the fire burned right through the pole and it fell down across the road.) It was blocking traffic, so we thought it would be a priority for the electric company. We called on Saturday and they said the problem had already been reported. They finally came on Thursday and did some makeshift repairs, and then on Saturday, a week after the pole fell, they fixed things in a more permanent way. Meanwhile, all this time, power lines were down across a busy street.

We know our repair is lower priority than that, so we're just trying to wait patiently. And here at school, the air conditioners are still humming!