When we got home last night, there wasn’t any power. No lights, no heat, nothing. We went out with the dogs and a flashlight and checked our wires; we own all the wiring on our property and are responsible for all of it. The power company will only work on it up to the transformer and after that, it’s our problem. (Oh, the joys of home ownership.)

When Brett had determined that all our lines were up, we went inside and I lit some candles and called Access Energy.

Amazingly, a woman answered the main number at eight o’clock at night. She said she knew there was some problem in Batavia, and that crews were working on it.

Brett built a fire and I looked up the neighbor’s number and called them. “Hello? This is Michelle, your neighbor. I was just calling to see… is your power out?”

“Yeah,” replied a teenaged-sounding boy. “It’s been out since two this afternoon.”

“Oh, okay, well, we don’t have power and I couldn’t see your house from here so I figured your place must be out too.”

“Yeah,” he said.

I thanked him and hung up and reported to Brett. He called Bo or Joe and then Jimbo to secure a generator.

Before we left for town to find some dinner, he had me call Access back to find out if it was worth bothering with the generator. This time I had to call the emergency number, and the guy who answered was really nice. I learned that they didn’t know where, exactly, the line was down, and that they were still en route to Batavia! (The neighbors had been out since two and Access couldn’t get a crew out until nine? Poor bastards must have been busy as hell yesterday.) He said it would be a minimum of two hours before power was restored, but that it would definitely be back up before morning.

We shut the woodstove back down, blew out the candles, hopped into Mr. Brett’s big black truck, and headed for town.

We passed the Access crew turning up 230th – a veritible parade of industrial vehicles and work trucks. We paused to talk to them and they still didn’t know exactly where the line was down but they seemed certain it was on our property and that they’d be cuttin’ trees down. We thanked them and headed Fairfieldward.

We were fairly quick; we borrowed Jimbo’s generator, swung by Bo’s to chat with Joe for a minute, hit the BK Lounge for drive-thru, and headed home.

All those trucks were ranged along the road edge of our property, headlights blaring, chainsaws a-runnin’.

We snuck in the back drive and Brett hooked the house up to the generator. (He’s my fucking hero. I would have no idea how to do that.) He had some scary looking redneck extension cord looking thing wired straight into the panel and was calling Ron – “my token electrician” – on the phone standing in front of it.

At some point, he walked down and talked to the power guys, telling them to leave the trees as we’d want them for firewood for next year. He said they were cutting down trees like crazy, and that the downed power line was laying right across the mouth of the driveway, and that we’d driven over it twice!

The generator gave us enough power to run the furnace blower and keep the fridges running, but it was too sketchy a power source to run the entertainment center – the amp just kept clicking like mad, trying to decide if it were on or off, until I switched off that power strip. My computer, of course, I’d unplugged before the generator went on.

After everything seemed to be marginally under control, I set the alarm for 2:AM so Brett could go out and put gas in the generator. We went to bed. Afterwards, I said, “Some couples have the roar of the surf. We have chainsaws and a generator! Ah, romance!” (I believe he may have actually giggled, but I’m not sure. It was pretty loud. He was grinning, at least.)

At midnight, an Access Energy flashlight strode up the driveway. Brett and I sat up to watch it approach. Finally, “He’s comin’ to the house!” I said, and tried to offer Brett a bathrobe while the caller knocked on the back door and the dogs went ballistic. Brett got his pants on and went to answer the door while I found something to wear myself (the bathrobe had been over the air conditioner and HAD FUCKING SNOW IN IT!). I heard the guy tell Brett that our power was back on, on a temporary run, and that they’d be out again the next day to fix it properly.

We were up, so we put on our shoes and Brett took the house back off generator power. With full power restored, the lights were brighter and we could watch a bit of The Weather Channel before going back to bed.

. . .

This morning, we found an orange cone in the center of our driveway, sitting right on top of the downed line, and trees cut down almost the entire length of the front of our property! They cut down almost everything between the front pond and the road, and a bunch of stuff on the other side of the driveway, too. It’s pretty intense, and Mr. Brett doesn’t seem all that damned thrilled with it.

It appears that a power pole either fell down or was knocked down by a tree; there’s an area where you can see downed trees and the broken pole. The rest of the pond front is mainly tree stumps, snow, and sawdust.

But this is the cool part. The pole holding up the temporary wire is a de-branched weed tree with a large ceramic insulator stuck on the top of it with – I don’t know, duct tape and chicken wire? It looks freaking wonderfully, totally redneck and hillbilly, and when I saw it this morning I squealed and got Brett to take me back up to the house to get my camera so I could take a picture of it!

{fake French accent}But my camera, her batteries? Ze were dead. So dead.{/fake French accent}

Bitch!

Access will probably have their temporary pole replaced by the time I get home. That cobbled together power pole insanity was a one-of-a-kind visual experience, and I failed you all!