Do you hear He-Man’s voice shouting that? Never heard it? I’ll fix that!

We lost power at 2 AM. I noted it and rolled over to go back to sleep, thinking that like 99% of the outages we have out here in the sticks that power would be back on in a couple of hours. At 5 AM, I woke up again, and the power was still off. Since I was the only one up, I put on some shoes and carried a flashlight down our long driveway to see whether I could see any lights across the road from us. Nada.

So, I called the power company, knowing that someone had to be the first person to notify them when there’s an outage or nothing gets done. I was the first. At hour number seven, I called back to see if they had any idea when power would be restored. They didn’t have a clue because a large pole went down in a swamp due to the storms we’ve had lately, and it wasn’t going to be an easy job to fix it.

Nice. A pole in a swamp. Who does that?

I had a good idea which swamp they were talking about, too. About a mile from us, way down the hill, is a place called Clear Lake. I think something was having fun naming it because it’s anything but clear. It’s a swamp. And it spreads outward every time it rains. Alligators live in it. In fact, about four years ago, a 10-foot gator took a stroll through an adjacent rice field. The kids love to fish there because they can watch the gators swim by when it’s warmer.

Anyway, we had to dig the generator out of the shop and start it up. We ran cords to the refrigerators. We have two. One for storage in the basement and one for the most-used items in the kitchen upstairs. With seven people in the house, we have to keep a lot of food on hand in case, you know, snowmaggedon or floods keep us cut off from town.

I know I sound like a complete hillbilly, but that’s country life. We love it. While the power was out, my SIL and dd headed to the store to buy vegetable plants for the garden they’re putting in. Yesterday, they were working on fencing to keep the horses inside. We had an incident the other day where some old fencing went down during a storm, and the horses ended up running through the ditch next to the highway to get to the green grass in our front yard. They’re penned in a small pasture now until the new fencing is done, but it’s raining today, so too wet to do any more fence work along the lower edge of the property where the ground is, you know, swampy, from the rain.

Anyway, the power is on again. Like a miracle. The day is shot so far is work is concerned, but I thought I’d pop my head in the door and tell you about my day. I’d love to hear about the weather-related issues you face on a regular basis.