Après le déluge

It seems that I’ve used this post title before, on a yearly basis since 2014 – so here’s the 2017 version: a week of sunlight is coming, but not until tomorrow. Meanwhile the County was under a state of emergency due to rain-driven flash-flooding, widespread power-outages (including here at The Ranch) and downed trees, and other assorted weather vicissitudes.
We had a friend who was up in Roseville at business meetings coming over for dinner Tuesday night, so I was at the Airport Lounge when power went down and unaware of the situation. In the morning I returned to discover the outage, checked the PG&E repair-time estimate, and talked with my neighbor the plumber across the fence-line. He was setting up his generator to deal with the situation, and had an electrician buddy there to help. He had heard two transformers blow during the night, on two different poles, and nobody had come out yet.
Around the corner up on Mother Lode Drive by the little Christian pre-school, a number of trees had come falling down into a ravine, taking the power-line with it in a jumble of branches. The line was stretched tight, waist-high in front of the school doors, so nobody was getting pre-schooled yesterday. Later in the afternoon three county trucks with cherry-pickers showed up, but I didn’t see anybody with a chainsaw and that’s what they were gonna need.
Since a county-wide “emergency” was declared, the fix-it time could be anywhere from “soon” to a few days, so grabbing a few things I went back to the lights and warmth. We had leftover pizza for dinner, and made ready to make a Costco run in the morning.
I awoke remarkably refreshed and absent of most cold symptoms, so good!