What do you do without power?

Thursday

I was awakened in the middle of the night hearing Chris' phone ring. It was the CSM saying that she had no electricity and asking we did. So he turned on the bathroom light to see. He then went back to bed. I had trouble sleeping after that. When I got up, he was gone and the power was off.

I watered here and away. I picked a melon, not certain it was ripe, but it wasn't getting any bigger. When I got home, I watered a lot of gopher mounds, but never saw a gopher. I planted two sprouted garlic.

I laid in the sun in a skimpy suit until noon. Then I watched The Highwire on my phone while making and eating breakfast. I had to light the gas burner with a match to heat the tea. Then power came on at 1:50, but went off again 45 minutes later. Chris texted that the generators had overheated. It came on again about 3:20. I went walking with Diane at the gym at 3:30. I was surprised it was open. No one else came. We walkted and talked, then she had to go back to work.

When I got home, I read e-mail. I cut the melon open, but discovered it wasn't a melon. I texted the pic to Jenni who was bagging at the commissary. She looked it up and said it was a white squash.

Michelle and Casey came over. He read the solar panel instructions and Michelle chatted with me. As we were sitting in the livingroom talking, Chris came home. Casey and I went out to test the solar panel kit and Michelle told Chris about an incident that happened earlier today.

We discovered that the solar panel will charge a 12 volt battery. Then the battery gets disconnected from the panel and connected to the inverter to run whatever appliance is plugged into it. We had to disassemble the lawn mower battery to get a 12volt unit to try it out. It worked. But as he was reassembling the battery, there was a spark and smoke. He checked everything and it was ok, but a wire broke. So he went home and got a soldering kit. He fixed it and put the battery back together.

Then we chatted with Michelle. I gave Michelle a jar of goat cheese. They left, and I worked on my blog. I also played my trombone until Chris was ready to watch. We watched Cheers. I got really sleepy and nearly went to bed, but the act of turning everything off woke me up and so I read e-mail until late.