I’ll bet you’re thinking I had some sort of horse/blog-related accident yesterday, right? Wrong! I was simply powerless to access the Web…or the water pump, lights, etc. Yep, the electricity was out.

I didn’t think anything of it; it happens all the time.

The lower moose is a teenage bull. If you look closely, you can see the antler starts. The upper moose is a yearling bull. It seems unusually small to me and was with it’s mother two days before I took this picture. If that’s true–and I choose to believe it is–it’s mother just chased him off, and he’s hanging with the older bull.

There is no electric grid here, just a single, not-at-all-straight line, and we are at the end of it. When something goes wrong on the line, there’s no shifting to a source from another direction; we are without power, unless we create it ourselves, and many people do. Being at the end of the line, we feel the effects when there’s a problem anywhere on it, and repairs begin at the far end, making us last on the list.

I’m not complaining. I like living without power as long as food doesn’t thaw, pipes and people don’t freeze, and everyone is safe. I got heaps of non-electric work done.

The power was off when I went to bed and still off when I woke up at 2:00 a.m. For some inexplicable reason, I was compelled to get up and call the automated power outage number. I expected to hear a list of the areas that were currently without power. I like to believe that gives me a sense of how long it will be before crews will get to our area, or maybe it will tell me where the problem is or something. Maybe it will help me decide if I need to start the generator to run the fridge. You know? In truth, it probably tells me nothing, but it gives me something to do.

Instead of getting automated information, I was plugged into the automated reporting system. They logged my phone number and asked if I had information about why there was no power here. I answered “no,” and the recording asked me to be patient while someone looked into it.

It was time. She had to chase him off to prepare for raising the next one. Sorry. I’ve only seen it twice and haven’t gotten a picture.

When the power goes out, I don’t generally call to report it. I figure plenty of other people will do that, and I’d be needlessly tying up the phone line. Is it possible everyone else figures the same thing? Had no one reported our power outage in the past ten hours? Or were we the only ones without power?

By 2:30 a.m. the power was back on. That’s not enough time to send a crew out this way, so the problem was fixable from town. Might I have had power yesterday if I’d just made a phone call?