Bzzzzt!

We got some heavy snow last Saturday.  It's usually no big deal, but this time, a branch broke off a tree in our neighbor's yard and took out our power line and cable (which is how we get our internet).  It didn't just break the line, it pulled the line off our house, right down to the box.  If this were rock climbing, I'd say we zippered our pro.

Of course, this happened at 11:30 on a Saturday night.  Utah Power came out and snipped the line around 2:00 a.m.  Of course, they knocked on our door first, causing the dog to flip out and waking Ben.  Lovely Wife spent the next couple of hours trying to get him back to sleep before waking me for my turn.

The power company guys told us that we had to have our service rebuilt before they could hook us up again, but that they could do it really quickly once we were fixed.

So at 4:00 a.m., I changed Ben's poopy diaper by the light of a headless Lego minifig flashlight clenched in my teeth.  We then pulled out a bunch of candles and cracked open the Yellow Pages for the first time in years.  I tried my IPhone first, but it was being very unresponsive and I figured I'd better save the battery anyway.

I called B&L Electric and the sleepy guy on the other end of the line promised that someone would be out after 8:00 a.m.  and the rate would be $117 per hour.  If we wanted to wait until Monday, it would be half that.  A few years ago (5 to be precise), I would have waited.  We would have hauled out the camping gear and camped in our house, reveling in the luxury of running water.  We'd have hauled out board games and made hot chocolate with the camp stove.  Not this time -- I wanted my power back ASAP.


The electrician showed up around 10:00 a.m., and was a chatty older fellow who was "near 70" and "usually work[s] on airplanes".  He was efficient and no-nonsense and finished up around 2:00 in the afternoon.  The power company guys were right there, but left inexplicably without restoring our power.  They showed up again around 8:00 and had our lights on by 8:30. phew.

Over at Along Came the Bird, Lana was wondering what our kids would do with no electronic devices.  Well, here're some things we did:

• moved the mini-tramp inside and BOUNCED LIKE CRAZY
• built a train track that looped all around the living room (the bridges are perfect for tripping over in the dark if you need some slapstick)
• went walkabout
• dumped toys out and made an obstacle course out of the empty bins
• built really tall lego towers and toppled them over *rawr*
• rolled noisy things down the stairs
• played with flashlights
• climbed into sleeping bags and pretended to be worms, zombies, and zombie worms

It was actually a really nice evening...Lovely Wive came home from work with Thai food.  We had a candlelit dinner and then everybody snuggled into sleeping bags on the couch to watch an old Shrek dvd on the laptop (OK, Ben just ran around with a flashlight).  We were all glad when the power came back, but the first thing we did was to turn the lights off and go back to our movie.

Oh, another thing:

If you live in Utah, please tell your congresspeople that you support HB69.  A lot of insurance companies specifically exclude treatment for autism.  It's a medical issue, and there's treatment that can help...treatment that's been proven to help 90% of the time.  29 states mandate that autism be covered by insurance.  In the next month, we'll find out if Utah will join them.