The Garden Planet Ann Arbor or at least its western hemisphere seems to be operating on a third world power grid these days. We have lived here at the Landfill more years than I am strong enough to count (it also represents how many years I have been a mother) and although we have had occasional power outages, even significant ones (i.e., 1997 ice storm), they have always been rare events. This summer, not so much. 10 times? Actually not that many for us but many people in the neighborhood, including W1.5, have had that many outages. I think it’s more like five for us.

Last night, *after* we had finished a dinner (chicken pot pie) that required the use of Gertrude’s oven and just before I was going to start Bertie (the dishwasher), we were in a nasty, flickery kind of brownout. And then out. I dunno. “They” (DTE Energy) keep trying to schluff (I made that word up) this off as storms or trees or equipment malfunctions. We have had some good rainstorms in the last week or so but the power did not go out during any of them. Trees? Maybe they are an issue but not sure why they are more an issue than they have been the other umpteen years we’ve lived here. Equipment malfunctions? Probably but again not sure why we are all of a sudden having so many issues. A perfect storm? Maybe.

So the power grid may be old and decrepit but I will give the power company credit for being up-to-date enough to create an app that actually works pretty well. I can see outages on it and I can report an outage at my house or wherever and they send me text messages about when they think we’ll have power again. Last night was a little scary. When I first reported our outage, the estimated fix was 10:30 PM. We packed up and crashed out, leaving a couple of very stable tea-lights out in key places in the house. I checked again in a little while and the estimate was now 11:30 PM Tuesday night. Yes that would be tonight and that would mean more than 24 hours without power. Yikes. I was strategizing how to keep all of my devices juiced up although I knew that the power in the Ninja and Cubelandia could be used to keep me connected.

I’m not *exactly* sure what time the power came back on. Was it 1:30 or 3:00 AM? Whatever. It is blacker than the ace of spades when I take my 0-skunk-30 walk these days, what with the very new waxing crescent moon (and fog this morning) but today’s pic is one I took of the power company’s generator over at the other end of Haisley School. Noisy as all get-out and smelling like gasoline. I encountered two more of these on my walk as well as a DTE truck. There were a lot of pitch black houses too but not sure if they had no power or just weren’t up yet and don’t keep low-level ambient LED lighting on 24-7 (like I do).

Seems kind of strange that the power company seemed to have to set up portable generators to get the power going in the neighborhood but whatever it takes. I just hope we don’t lose power again tonight or any time soon.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 4th, 2016 at 5:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.