Saturday May 10th was another day of the curse. The plan was to wake up early and start working on our basement office floor, prepping the floor and installing Pergo. But the Curse had other plans for us.
At 4:30 A.M. I awoke to the tintinnabulation of the myriad UPS’s around the house complaining that they had lost power. I swiftly jumped out of bed to address their grievances. In my hazy half-awake fugue state I noticed that only some of the UPS’s were complaining about power, like wise, some of the smoke alarms we’re complaining as well (I guess some need new batteries). I then noticed that the lights in the Unfin had power, but the UPS’s were complaining. That was odd. Then I noticed that the lights were very very dim. The AC was running but the blower sounded like it was running at ΒΌ of capacity, I could barely hear it.
Then the lights went out and the AC stopped. But only some of the lights. I tried to figure out what was going on, but just wasn’t awake enough to make sense of it. So I shut down all the PC’s, even the one’s whose UPS’s weren’t complaining,
Traci called AEP and found out there were no problems reported in our area. Great, we think, it’s a problem for us alone!
So we went back to bed.
At 7A.M. the AEP guy came out and verified that sure enough we weren’t getting all the power we should. One phase was dead somewhere between our house and the big green box.
He put a call in for a crew to come out and find the break and repair it.
Naturally one of the sets of lights that was off was in the Unfin, so no working on the floor.
The second AEP crew showed up around noon and found the break, dug a whole and found the part of the power line that has literally disintegrated. They said “that happens”. The lines get nicked and the water gets in over time and this is the reaction, the line turns to white powder. So the they spliced the line and left the whole with some cones around it, because, naturally, they cut the phone line while digging for the power line. You can see the hole at www.floozyspeak.com.
Amazingly Verizon was able to show up by 2P.M and decided to run a new line up the house rather than try a splice the cut line. Hopefully they’ll replace the “new line” with a real outdoor rated cable, right now it’s plain old CAT3 with a splice connecting two different colored lines wrapped in a plastic bag.
So, by 2P.M. we were back in action. Meanwhile I had a trip to the outskirts of Pickerington with Troy to get a table saw from his father. I no idea Pickerington went almost to Lancaster.
We did manage to get the carpet and the padding tore up and rolled up and moved into the theater room for “storage”, at least until we can empty out the Unfin and put down carpet in there, it’s great for absorbing water!