As I’m sitting here in 60-degree weather, I’m watching
the evening weather report that’s telling me a storm is heading this way that
will linger for about three days, dump over a foot of snow…and likely cause power
outages.
Unfortunately, I live in a neighborhood that invented the
words “power outages.” Those of us who live here don’t even dare
sneeze when we walk by a power line because we’re afraid we’ll lose power. A
bird landing on one of the lines also causes us to hold our collective breaths
and pray. And anything stronger than a slight breeze is a guaranteed recipe for
disaster.
So the wisest investment I ever made was a full-house
automatic generator-system. Thirty seconds after the power goes out, it pops on
and continues to run the essentials. The only problem I’ve had with it is my
own fault. You see, when the generator was installed, I was allowed to choose
only 10 items to connect to it.
It took me endless hours of debating before I decided
which items to connect. Of course, there were the obvious ones (at least to me,
they were): the refrigerator, the furnace, the artesian-well pump, the water
heater, the automatic garage doors, and my two satellite dishes – one for the
TV and the other for the Internet. But choosing the last three was what caused
me to lose sleep.
Did I need the washer and dryer? Nah, the laundry could
wait. Did I need a light in the hallway bathroom or only in the master
bathroom? And how about the porch light out back so the dogs could see where to
do their duties after dark? Or maybe the light over the gas range so I’d be
able to distinguish what I was burning for dinner?
I finally made my last three selections (the porch light,
the master bathroom and the range light) and everything was hooked up to the
generator.
But not until after the next power failure struck did I
learn just how weird my house was.
For example, the range and the refrigerator are right
next to each other but are on different circuits. Yet the range and the outlet
in the kitchen island share the same one. So when the range light was hooked to the
generator, I also was able to use the island outlet.
That turned out to be the only outlet out of the 10 in my
kitchen I could use. And not one of the nine overhead lights, other than the
one directly above the range, worked. So although I could see what I was
cooking, I had to go prepare the food in the laundry room first, where, for
some reason, the ceiling lights (but not the washer and dryer) were on the same
circuit as the refrigerator out in the kitchen.
Even crazier, although the master bathroom had lights,
the bedroom had no power at all, not even a nightlight.
It took a lot of getting used to, but now during power
outages, I’m no longer flipping switches in rooms not hooked up to the
generator system, nor am I trying to turn on the microwave that’s plugged into one of
the 10 dead kitchen-outlets.
But the bathrooms actually were what
originally convinced me to make the decision to spend a good chunk of my life’s
savings on the generator system.
It was the year before my husband passed away, when a
huge snowstorm blew in and promptly knocked out the power. The moment we were
thrust into darkness, we knew there also would be no water because our well’s
pump is electric. That meant we had only one flush left in each of our two
toilets.
So we vowed to save those two flushes until the need to
use them became absolutely necessary. In other words, anything liquid didn’t
warrant a flush. And believe me, because my husband was on prescription
diuretics, there was a constant flow of liquid going into those toilets.
The first night of that power outage, I was in the living room, struggling to
do some intricate craftwork by candlelight without much success. In fact, I
made so many errors, I prayed that when I displayed my crafts at the church’s
annual Christmas fair the next weekend, only people with severe cataracts
would attend.
Suddenly I heard my husband’s agonized cry come from the
bathroom. I rushed down the hall and shouted through the door, “Are you OK?”
“Nooooo!” came a wail from the other side. “I accidentally flushed! I am
stupid, stupid, stupid! I wasted a perfectly good flush! I could kick myself!”
The way he was carrying on, you would think he’d accidentally flushed a roll of
$100 bills.
I must point out that prior to this, every time I headed toward the bathroom,
he would shout, sounding like a trained parrot, “Remember! Don’t flush!” until
I was ready to stuff him into the toilet and use my one good flush to make him
disappear.
So my first reaction in response to his agony over the fateful flush was to
burst out laughing.
“Don’t worry about it,” I finally said. “I’ll go fill up
a bucket with snow and melt it and we’ll have some water for flushing in no
time.”
I soon discovered that a five-gallon bucket of snow melted down to a whopping
half-inch of water. A person could have died of constipation before I'd have been
able to melt enough snow for a decent flush.
Two days later, we still had no power and hadn’t even been plowed out yet. So I
was trapped in the house and forced to listen to my husband still
lamenting over the precious flush he’d wasted.
It was torture, sheer torture. So I vowed at that moment that if I survived the
power failure without winding up in prison for attempted murder, I would save
every penny for a generator system.
And until I did, I also vowed to keep at least one
bathtub full of water at all times…just in case there ever was another sudden
need for emergency flushing.
But mostly it was for the sake of my sanity.
# # #
Sally Breslin is a native New Englander and an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science-fiction. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net
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