Electricity, Unions, Napless Days, and a Flat Tire.

The last few days have been pretty busy. We've been running errands, TRYING to keep up with kids schedules, and trying to squeeze in some fun stuff too.

Yesterday, early in the morning, i woke up to the sound of NOTHING. That's right, the power went out and the house went dead silent--no A/C hum, no roar of the fans, refrigerator and whatever house noises we become so accustomed to. About 10 mins later a few of our smoke alarms started beeping because of low batteries to which i couldn't do much about without making a lot of noise and fumbling around in the dark. Eh...throw a pillow over my ears, kick the blankets off the bead, because it certainly will heat up and try to go back to sleep. Which i finally did until 8am when we awoke to the power still off. Dang It.

Upon trying to search for the reason for the outage, I find out that a storm in the night knocked over a tree that in turn knocked over 15 power lines and blocked our main road to get in and out of Ewa. Dang It Again.

So, we decided to face the traffic, get our of Ewa, find some power, eat some banana pancakes and run some errands. Which we do and all is well until we find out that at 3:30pm a supposedly planned strike by the union workers of our ONLY power plant on the island has put all storm repairs on freeze. Dang It Once Again.

I would like to interject here, that coming from the South where Unions are not an issue, it's all a bit foreign to me. Today's issue was obviously bad timing on the 8000 homes in Ewa Beach,
but supposedly good timing for Hawaiian Electric workers. I do care about workers being treated fairly, but excuse me if I care more about getting our electricity back at the moment. If you would like to read more about what happened here are some articles. Here and Here.


Anyway, we go out and eat again, this time it's not so fun with fussy babies who have had two days of no naps. Then, we have to run to the grocery store to get ice and food that will work in a possible long-term outage. We also stop at Sports Authority to buy their LAST Coleman stove, that in all honestly we should have bought years ago...between camping and power outages, we always say we wish we had one.

Then it was home to a dark, hot night of playing boardgames by candlelight in front of the draftiest window we have. Not too terrible. That is until Megan calls us because she has been stranded downtown after a whale watching tour with a flat tire in our car. Dang It Yet Again.

We have probably had close to 8 flats on this car since living on this island 5 years. Yeah. You heard me right. Thank the Lord for Geico, and Good Roadside Assistance. And also, thank the Lord for his good timing. This whole day could have been 10 times worse without my sweet, wonderful, capable, all-providing husband. I love him. Really.

Then, at about 3:30am this morning i awoke to the sound of HUMMING. A/C, Fans, Refrigerators...and even various lights all through the house from when we kept hitting light switches trying to turn lights on throughout the day in habit.

Apparently, the 20-30 Non Union workers that HECO has working for them along with borrowed help from the local cable and telephone companies, our power was restored. The roads have not been cleared and traffic is still a problem. But who cares when you can take hot showers, sleep in the cool air, and cook your own food.

Man. We are SO PLUGGED IN! I'm the first to say i enjoy taking time out, camping and enjoying the peaceful slowness of just being with family and friends--but i love it on my terms. Not HECO's.