Kablink….barely 7:30 on a beautiful Saturday morning in May and no power.  No wind, no sound, no flicker. Wait for it, it will come back on in just a moment.  Hmmm, it didn’t so no point in waiting poised to reboot the computer.
Go outside and check the breaker box & meter. This is so much easier on a nice morning than it is in the fall or winter.  Of course, in the winter you can look through the branches and see if the neighbors have any lights on.  If they don’t, it is not just us.  Breakers are all on and ‘no one is home’.  Hmmm, use the cell o phone and call it in.  It is all automated these days, but if it is an outage, you keep pushing the #1, and finally enter your home phone number.  The recording thanks you politely for reporting, but you don’t get any information.
Call a neighbor down the road.  No answer.  Call your sister because it is about that time of day and you don’t want the phone in the bedroom ringing because hubby is taking advantage of no power and is napping.  It is the only land line phone that works when the power is out.  Yep, old fashioned wired in, not a cordless! Which is why we keep it.
Yak with her a bit, and realize the call waiting feature of the cell phone is activating.  Manage to put her on hold, take the other call [from the neighbor, who DOES have power] and get back to sister without losing her!  Wow, first time I’ve ever done that, and had this cell phone for almost 2 1/2 years!
Call the power company again to get an ‘update’ and the friendly recording says yes they know, and it should be fixed by 11 AM.  No clue as to the problem.
Make up the beds in the spare room as we have company coming, and blessedly there is plenty of light to make beds by!  Can’t vacuum, mop, wash dishes or clothes, or continue cooking.  Can’t check the email, play Words with Friends or water plants.  Can’t sew bears and really don’t have any to cut out right now.
Might as well read for a bit.
Truck noises and someone honks the horn outside the door.  Not many have keys to our gate, and sure enough it is a power company truck.  He verifies the address and that I still have no power.  Walks over to the meter and says “well you are red tagged, it means they shut you off.”  WHAT THE HECK?? And EXCUSE ME, but we’ve been paying the bill for 37 years here, EVERY month and the last one JUST came this week!  “Well, Ma’am, that’s what the red tags mean.”  NO WAY, and it has been hanging there for years, ever since they put in the ‘new’ electronic meter AND set it so I couldn’t open our breaker box without taking the hinges off I’ll have you know.
He says “I’ll call it in” which he does and says they’ll check it and get back to him.  Meanwhile he pulls red tag [‘hmm, kinda an old type’] and pulls the meter.  He comments that usually if it has been shut off they also put something in behind the meter, which is not there.  Well of course it is not there, we have been paying!  Gets out his volt meter and nope not even a trickle of power to the main switch.
Now he is looking up at the pole with the transformer on it [such a beautiful feature in the corner of our yard, but hey, gotta have it] and says ‘fuse not blown’ but…’hmmm, looks like a loose wire, how the heck could that happen?’
While he is trying to figure out if he can get his bucket truck to the pole [nope, can’t] the office calls back and says they can find no reason for our power to be shut off.  Well, HELLO.  Of course he has already figured out that is not the issue anyway!
Do we have power?  Yes, he climbed the pole, and reconnected the wire.  It had apparently been loose for some time as it showed a lot of melting on the end.  Not dangerous to anyone where it was located but certainly not conducive to a constant flow of power to our house.  By 10 AM we were back in business.