Now Where Were We?

Before we were so rudely interrupted? Stupid storm. As I write this, the generator is still humming out behind the house. The dial says it's producing twenty-five kilowatts. And that's powering the nine houses in our hamlet. Of course, only six of them are permanently inhabited. And a seventh is occupied by the people in Paris who own it and are down right now.

A battered "men working" sign out behind a wood pile in the vineyard.

We can't, of course, tell the difference between normal power and this generated power. All is the same, except for the sound of the engine running twenty-four-seven. But that's ok. Electricity is a good thing. We have no idea when the electric company will be able to restore normal power. I kept wondering how long the generator could go on 400 liters of fuel before it needs to be refilled. I found out last night. Around 11:00 pm, just a little more than 72 hours after they first fired it up, it quit. Our lights went out again. Merde!

After a couple of hours I heard some commotion out back and got up to see some electric company people out there, in the dark, futzing (is that how you spell that?) around with the generator. I got the impression they were refilling the tank, but I'm not sure. After a while the generator came back on and so did the digital clocks in the house. So we have power again. Ken says that it looks like all the downed wires that feed our hamlet have been repaired, but we're still on the generator. Oh well, it won't last too much longer, I'm sure.

Ken and I spent some quality time in the yard on Saturday morning. We burned a little, but the smoke was thick and blew right into our neighbor's yard, so we let the fire go out before we burned everything. Ken picked up a lot of downed branches that we're using for kindling in the wood stove. I fired up the chainsaw and cut some more wood for the fire. We use the central heating in the morning, but the fire still burns most evenings. The weather people say it will stay cold for a while longer.