The Great Disconnect

I woke up Thursday morning and discovered we had no internet service. When I came downstairs to get coffee, I checked the temperature:

That reads MINUS 20 degrees Fahrenheit, and that is the air temp, not the wind chill.

I got my cup of coffee and went back upstairs to bed. I was reading, on my iPad, when the power went out.

I woke up the husband. We got dressed and went outside. I held the flashlight for him while he tried to start the generator. He runs the generator regularly and keeps it full of gas, but getting it going in that kind of weather required starter fluid, the battery-powered heat gun and—from me—lots of fervent prayers. After about 20 minutes of messing around, the engine caught and it started up.

Getting the generator started was one problem; keeping it running was another. Under normal weather conditions, it will power the house and shop. At those temps, though, the husband had to minimize the load on the generator by taking the shop off generator power and turning off the hot water heater. We had only a few lights on in the house. I could sew, but I couldn’t use my iron.

As the morning went on, information trickled in about the cause of the outage. We didn’t lose power because of lines being down. We lost power because our electric co-op gets its power from Bonneville Power, in Washington state, and BPA shut down the flow of electricity into western Montana. I assume they were trying to protect the grid in WA state. Our electric co-op had to scramble to redistribute the load over the grid here as a result.

We got power back mid-morning. The rest of the east side of the valley had it back by Thursday evening. I blessed the husband a thousand times over for having installed that wood boiler this fall. We were plenty warm inside, and because he ran the ductwork in such a way that the wood boiler also heats water, we had plenty of hot water even though the water heater was off.

I have lots of thoughts about this. Most of them may have to wait for a future blog post. We still don’t have internet service and am using my cell phone as a hotspot to post this. I am signing us up for Starlink as soon as I can. CenturyLink is a joke. They cannot, or will not, maintain their service lines, and every time our internet goes out, it is out for days. DD#2 couldn’t work on Thursday.

And because Mother Nature thinks she is funny, the forecast for Monday is 40F and rain.

The mountains were so pretty this week, though:

You take the bad with the good. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.