Not My Day

Today was not my day.  The power went out in our house.  I'm not sure exactly what time because I was upstairs and the power was working fine in most of the rooms upstairs, but not at all downstairs.  When I noticed this I was really confused.  I had never heard of this happening before.  I went to the breaker box and nothing had been flipped.  I flipped some breakers to test it out, and it didn't make any difference.  I went outside to the main breaker, flipped it, went back inside.  No difference.

I used my phone to google "half house without power" and a Yahoo! Answers came up.  (What did we ever do before the internet, especially on our phones?)  The question was similar to my problem, and the person that answered suggested that the house wasn't getting the full amount of volts (i.e. 120v instead of 240v) that it required to run everything.  He suggested calling the power company.

So I called Rocky Mountain Power and the electronic voice said they'd send someone soon.  5 minutes later I called back to check on the status and it said that it should be fixed by 2:30 pm.  It was noon.

So, I played games on my cell phone, and around 1:15 the doorbell rang.  It was the guy from Rocky Mountain Power.  He said "Half of your house has power." I never told them that when I called, so obviously he had figured out the problem.  He had some strange looking part in his hand which he said had died and he was going to replace it.  Then he said that everything would work except for the dryer, and the range.  There was something else that needed to be fixed first, and that would be done later in the day.

Around 4:30, our doorbell rang, but I ignored it because I wasn't feeling well.  About 2 minutes later, our power went out.  And it was out until about 7:15.  I am glad I bought us that emergency kit.  It had one of those chargeable flashlights, and a solar charger.  I used the flashlight to charge my almost dead iPhone.  (I thought it was pretty clever!)

I checked through the window to try and see what they were doing.  It looked like they had to dig up part of our neighbors yard to fix the problem.  (They were affected by the outage too).  I'm glad they didn't have to do that to our yard.

In addition, I think our smoke alarms are possessed.  We've had problems with them since before we moved in.  Sometimes they will just randomly go off.  It's obnoxious.  And it drives us crazy.  Me more than Connor because I'm home more than him.  So, today, to make things worse, one of our smoke detectors wouldn't shut up.  I tried everything I could thing of.  At the end it was beeping 3 short beeps/minute, which according to the back means that it needs serviced?  Ugh.  I ended up unplugging it and taking the battery out.  I think the whole thing just needs to be replaced.

The bright side: I wasn't scheduled to work today.  If this had happened on a day that I was scheduled to work it would have been way more stressful.