bored at work--electric debacle

Due to the "inclement" weather in Northern Texas, we are waiting waiting waiting for our shipment from Houston and Austin. They are being driven rather than flown up here. Gah! Houston is still at least an hour away, and who knows where Austin is. Luckily for you, I have time to blog away!

When I left work at 8:30 this morning, I was looking forward to going home to a nice warm bed and getting some desperately needed sleep. Hah on that one. When I got to my house, it seemed a tad chilly. I went straight to the utility room to feed the boys, and when I flipped the light switch nothing happened. Cripes, the power was flickering yesterday, and today is was just plain out. I looked at the temperature thingy I've got by the door, and it was 53 degrees in my house. I like it chilly, but that was a bit much. I then realized that the entire house was not without power. The hallway, bathroom, and tv room had power. Unfortunately, none of those circuits controlled the heater, the water heater, or anything involved with heat. I found my step ladder, crawled in the closet and started futzing with the breakers in the fuse box, but it didn't look like any of them had been tripped. Arrgh! I was getting really cold. I did what any warmish blooded American woman would do--I called my father. I explained the situation, went breaker by breaker through the fuse box with him, went outside (in the cold, cold rain) to look at the meter, and finally he decided I had "dropped a phase." Huh? Then he preceded to give me a mini physics lecture on alternating current. While, surprisingly, it made sense, it wasn't solving my problem. That's when I decided I had to call the power company.

Did you know that Green Mountain Energy does not have anyone you can speak with on the weekends? Ya, I found that out today--Saturday. Luckily, after a lot of looking, I found the number to call for emergency power outages. Of course it sent me to TXU. Anywho, when I got the woman on the phone, my power immediately came back on. It was a miracle! I explained my problem, told her about the dropped phase (which she completely understood), and she said they'd send someone out at some point. About 2 minutes after we got off the phone, the power died again. Arrgh!!! I called back, got someone different, and said I wanted her to magically fix it like the previous woman had. We both laughed at that one. She said that someone would be out by 11:30am to look at my problem. At that point, I bundled up in wool socks, slippers, an extra sweat shirt, and my comforter on the front sofa and tried to sleep. Ya, that didn't happen.

The TXU man actually got to my place about 10:15--way ahead of schedule. God bless TXU. He wandered around for a bit and found the problem. Out at the meter, some of the "ancient wirings" (his words) were shot. The insulation was gone, the wires were dry-rotted, and the rain hitting the wires was causing a short. Also, if you looked at it from the just-right angle, you could see smoke coming from the bad wires. Eek! There were even some scorch marks on the house. Guess I'm lucky the place didn't go up in flames at some point previously. He was able to make a temporary fix so I can have power until we have an electrician come out and repair the whole shebang. I repeat, God bless TXU!

At this point, I was able to go to bed and get a whopping 3 hours sleep before I had to get back up to go to a family gathering and then work. Just please don't let me get iced in up here.