What A Day!

I was startled awake this morning by a beeping noise at 3 am. I knew it wasn’t my alarm clock, but could not figure out what it was. It stopped beeping but about 15 minutes later, it did it again. I finally figured out that it was my weather station console which sits on my dresser in my bedroom. The station has alarms on it if the outside temperature gets to certain levels. I thought I had them turned off, but I guess I only turned off the one for the heat. Our outside temp dipped below 32° this morning and that was why the alarm kept going off. I finally realized what it was, turned it off and went back to sleep.

I got out of bed at 6 am because I was taking my car over to the dealer to have it serviced and I had to be there by 8:30 am.

We had been warned by our community office that they were going to do electrical maintenance in our community today and that the power would be off and on sporadically between 8 am and 3 pm, so we were expecting the electricity to possibly go out at 8 am, but while I was on my computer, the power went out just before 7:30 am. This sucked, because my car was still inside the garage, so I had to disconnect my electric garage door so I could manually pull it up to get the car out.

Jean and I had planned for her to come pick me up at the dealer and then we’d go to breakfast and we were planning on going to the L.A. Zoo so we wouldn’t have to be home without power.

Then we found out that the power went off not because our guys who were going to do the maintenance turned it off. We found out that 3 major fuses or breakers exploded on the 2 poles just outside of our community gate. SoCal Edison had to come to fix it, but it took them awhile to figure out where the explosions had happened. Once they found it, they had to wait for more workers to come so they could repair it.

I took my car to the dealer, Jean picked me up and then we went to Crazy Otto’s to have breakfast, but because we forgot it was a holiday, there was a line outside the door, so we went to IHOP for breakfast instead.

While eating, we got to thinking that because of the holiday, kids would be out of school and that the zoo would be very crowded. So instead, we decided to go to the San Fernando Mission and go on their self-guided tour.

I got a call that they serviced my car, but while servicing it, they found that the battery was leaking. It was still under warranty, so they put a new one in. Then they said I needed an alignment because my care is 2 ½ years old and they recommend re-alignments ever 2 years. I knew that if the car is out of alignment, it wears the tires faster, so I told them to go ahead and do it.

We went to a few stores to waste time and then went to pick up my car. When we got home, the power was still out. Edison said they would have it fixed in about 2 hours, and around 4:30 pm, it finally came back on.

I had noticed about an hour before it came back on that my food my freezer was starting to defrost, so I got my generator out connected my garage refrigerator and big freezer to it so the food would not go bad. I moved all of my perishable food from the house refrigerator into the garage refrigerator. About 20 or 30 minutes later, the power came back on, but I decided not to move anything back into the house yet because they still have to do the community maintenance on the electricity and I might have to use the generator again.

Jean called me and said her house still only has power in have of it and some of the neighbors on her street were having the same problem. Since we have manufactured homes, we can have one half with power and one half without if there is a problem. I told Jean to take here perishables out of her refrigerator and freezer and bring it over to my house so we could put it into my big freezer. So we just finished doing that.

What a day!