The Pioneers had it made!

We always thought that it was kinda' funny that people think that they NEED electricity. The pioneers had everything that they needed.

One thing that the pioneers didn’t have was power failures! When the pioneer’s fire started flickering, they just poked it a few times and added another log, or more oil to the lamp.

When our lights start to flicker we start to cross our fingers and start saying; “Stay on, stay on, stay on… Oh please stay on. Usually the lights dim and get dark yellow. It’s not really a brown-out like they call it. I’ve seen it a lot, I know! They get yellow, then maybe red, but not brown. Then they come back on and we say; “Oh thank-you, thank-you, thank-you“. Then they dim again and we say; “Oh nooooo“, then we hold our breath. If they come back on we say, “oh good!” with a huge sigh of relief. Then when they start to dim the third time, we curse profusely under our breaths, because we know that the inevitable is about to happen. Then sure enough, the lights go clean out and it gets completely black, and you can hear the refrigerator and freezer coast to a stop, and the fans slowly stop turning. Black, peaceful, silence. It’s almost a relief, because now you don’t have to worry about it any more.

Then, beep… Beeep… Beeeeeep… We have so many power failures that we wisely put uninterruptible power supplies on our computers. All three of them; mine, my wife‘s. and downstairs my mother has a computer. The beep means that you have to turn the computers off. So then we feel our way to the flashlights, all kept in strategic places, for when the power goes off. Woe be unto him that moves the flashlight. Moving a flashlight, whether or not we are in a power failure, is the impetus for a lecture. “The flashlight being in the right place during a power failure could mean the difference between life or death”. At least we like to pretend that they are that important, because we were smart enough to stock up on flashlights. Every time the power goes out, we say Thank-God we were smart enough to stock up on flashlights. We even have a Five Million candlepower flashlight, just in case we need to see clear across the valley. Never mind the fact that we have never needed to see clear across the valley at any time before the power failed. But the old “five Million” is a real comfort to us in a power failure.

The bad thing about a power failure, is that the dog is afraid of thunder. Yes, that same dog that rips out her doggie door in the middle of the night to fly into a gaggle of Coons, to chase them all up trees, and keep them there until I tell her that it is okay, and it is all over. That same dog that bays from her porch at passing Bobcats, Mountain Lion, Bears and the like, is afraid of thunder. That same dog that if it weren’t for her, she knows full well, that any number of animals would slip in the doggie door and eat our faces off while we slept. She is very proud of herself for saving us. She is a dog, and she fails to see the irony in the fact that if we didn’t have a doggie door, we would be safe from those critters anyway! Yep, that same dog is afraid of thunder. At the first far off rumbling of thunder, she will bound up on the bed and curl up on your face, and shiver uncontrollably. When that happens, I usually thank myself for bathing her regularly.

As I’ve probably told you, she is a very smart dog and she has been able to make the connection between thunder, fireworks, house lights flickering, and power failures. Now that we have un-interruptible power supplies that beep, she has been able to connect the beeping sound with all of the above. Now, if anything beeps she is terrified. No, not during the day, she can sleep right through beeping sounds all day long. But, at night when YOU are trying to sleep, she will be curled up on your face shivering. My wife and I always make sure that our cell phones and beepers are plugging into the charger at night, so the low battery beep doesn't happen.

If the power failure goes on for very long, we have a generator, that only I can hook up and make run, so that gives me great importance. We can run the refrigerator and the freezer and still have enough power for lights and microwave cooking. If you turn the refrigerator off you can perk a pot of coffee with the electric percolator. The power usually goes of in the winter time, so we already have a fire in the stoves. The downstairs wood heater has a flat top that is good for cooking, and it also has heat collection coils plumbed to the water heater in the attic. The upstairs heater is also a flat top heater but doesn’t have water heating coils. If we get too much hot water it relieves out the temp valve to the outside. I used to work for the cable TV company, so there is a generator at the cable satellite receiving station. So it keeps the TV on just in case the only power failure is in Benbow. That way the rest of the system can be working. So, I can watch the storm on television with Jim Bernard. I usually mutter something like “I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight?” That usually stops us from envying all of those people with power.

We don’t need the generator we have wood heat and oil lamps for long term failures, and we could cook the food from the freezer and refrigerator if it looked like the power would be off a long time, like it was in 1964, during the aftermath of the flood.

I've recently been reading that you can keep grain and cereal products preserved indefinitely in plastic five gallon buckets that have been purged of all of the oxygen with a nitrogen bottle. I have everything but the grain, so I might put forty or fifty gallons of grain up. But, my wife reminds me that I still have the stash I put away for the first gulf war, 9-11, the second gulf war, and there was something else I hoarded grain for but we can’t remember. She says that I’m like the dog, if it weren’t for the men of the world causing all of these problems, that we wouldn't need to protect ourselves from them.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, the lights flickered tonight.