Major Power Outage!

Did you hear the news? San Diego, part of Orange County and down to Mexico was without power yesterday. I was in a meeting when everything turned off. We thought one of the fuses blew, but when we realized the AC was out too, we knew we were experiencing a black out. People got on their cell phones and checked the news to find out everyone in San Diego was without power. At that point we decided it was time to go home.

Now with all the mess of the power outage it took Peter 1 1/2 hours to get to my parents house from his work. This usually takes about 10-15 minutes. It took me 45 minutes to get home (normally 15 min.) and I had three stoplights that were actually working.

My parents were already having an eventful day when in the morning my brother shows up in my parents room with a towel on saying that he just took an ice cold shower and the water won't turn off. Luckily the neighbor is a handyman, so he came over and turned the water off to the whole house early and then came over a bit later and fixed the problem. Then a couple hours after the power went out he fired up his spare generator and came over asking if we wanted to plug my brother's 210 gallon salt water fish tank into the generator to keep the fish alive. He did that and we thought it was quite thoughtful of him to think of my brother's fish. He came over a little later and said, "Hey do you want to plug your refrigerator in too?" My mom eagerly took him up on the offer, so none of her food went bad. My neighbor is such a nice guy.

We were prepared! We got home and it was a bit dark. We found our LED lights (most ingenious devices). We had three, Connor liked them and played with them until he broke one. We didn't let him play with them after that. Then I went and found our emergency kit. It had three glow sticks that said they were good for two years. We popped one open and it's light was pathetic. Clearly they had been in the kit for longer than two years. Then I remembered I had newer glow sticks upstairs. I had 10 of them and they were awesome! We snapped two of them and they really lit up the house. Connor liked playing with them too.

Here's a fun video of Connor playing in the dark

We put Connor to bed around 8:30 or 9 (he had a late afternoon nap 5-6) so we let him stay up past his normal bedtime. Then it was just the two of us...So what do we do? We decide to play cards in the dark. We had three fake candles which gave off very little light, one glow stick and one LED light and we played cards. We pulled up our vacuum and opened the front compartment that holds all the head tools and hung the glow stick to that and then put the LED light in facing down. It was a pretty awesome plan and gave us a lot of light to play with.
(In this picture the LED light is on the ground...we came up with the plan to put it up later and got a ton more light out of it.)
Around 8:45 I got a text message from my boss saying school was cancelled for today.
By 10 we went to bed. Around 1:30 the power came back on and we were woken up by a loud high pitched beeping noise. The stupid fire alarm needed to be reset (luckily it was just a beep and not the actual alarm to all the units). I got another text message from my boss saying that school might be in session, she wasn't sure yet, so be prepared. By 3:30 the beeping noise was still going on....so annoying! At 5:30 I got another text saying that school would still be cancelled for the day! Happy Birthday to me! And by 5:30 the beeping noise had finally stopped.

I'm really glad we had the good glow sticks. Totally worth the purchase! We also had a battery operated radio which if we held just perfectly we could listen to.