Powerless

Literally. Bad weather yesterday knocked out power in a variety of spots in and around Lansing. DTE, bless their hearts, still haven’t upgraded their outage reporting phone bank, so while the power went down around 4:30 PM where I was, I didn’t actually get connected to their automated system until about 11 PM. That system took my phone number and promised a service tech would call back.

Yeah. I really believe that one.

So, emergency preparedness… not so hot. We’d be really deeply inconvenienced if we didn’t have the travel trailer, and even that isn’t as useful as it might be. Diane took it to a field trial event and stopped by the Flying J truck stop on the way back. Flying J’s often have RV dump stations, and she used that one, but also used almost all the fresh water in flushing out the tanks. Our main issue is going to be fresh water availability. Our house uses well water and an electric pump. No AC on the mains, no water from the well. We may need to take the trailer out and find a station with a potable water spigot sometime today.

We have the travel trailer refrigerator, which should run for most of a week on the propane that we have. I’ve hooked up an extension cord to run into the house and am currently running the generator to power the inside refrigerator and freezer. I’ll do that periodically today. That’s also why I can get online now, with the laptop charging up and using the Verizon phone card for the laptop. We are OK on basic foodstuffs.

Diane tells me that the power has been out here for a couple of days at a time before, when tornadoes hit Williamston. This is one drawback to a rural location, in that we are pretty much at the bottom of the service list. We’ll get our power back pretty much last.