"Friday Night (No) Lights"

shall i do a play by play or just give a brief synopsis of the events of friday night? hmmm.....
As you might be able to tell from the post title, we were with out power here late friday night into saturday morning. The power outage was due to the over and increased use of air conditioners in the 115-120 degree heat here in LA....especially here in the west valley.

We were cautioned on thursday by authorities for every one to cut down on power between the hours of 4pm and 6pm to conserve and avoid power outages. Surprisingly every one did so and there were no outages...The news reported that the Dpt of water & power was actually surprised, that the requests were met and the demands for power were kept low. Well, I guess the good people of LA thought the same request didn't apply for friday, an even HOTTER day. So, sure enough around 4:15pm.....CLICK.....everything goes out. the air shuts off...my studio goes silent right in the middle of work (for some reason, my expensive backup power unit failed to kick in). At first it wasn't a full power outage, it was a brown out...so a lot of electronics in the house were buzzing and clicking on half power. So we went around the house unplugging everything we could so nothing would get damaged. And if anything was going to get the little bit of power coming in, we wanted it to be the fridge.

So...being that i had plenty of work to get done...i was kinda ticked that I wouldnt be able to do so. So we sat and hung out and I said...look at the bright side...."it happened late in the day and it's only going to get cooler as the sun goes down". Boy was that a statement I wish i could take back. At the time of the outage it was 100 or so degrees outside. Thinking that opening any doors with in that first hour or two would let in the extreme heat...we opted to keep the doors closed and keep the cool air that was in the house, in as long as possible. Well...that didn't last too long AT ALL....before we knew it, it was getting pretty darn stuffy in the house. So we started opening all windows and doors....we wanted to make sure the boys had a cool room to sleep in that night. Preparing them for bed we just left them in their diapers...opened up their windows and hoped the 'not so hot breeze' that was outside would keep the house some what comfortable. Well shortly after laying them to sleep...the power went completely out, not that the little we had was usable anyway. Oh yeah, and that slight breeze i told you about...gone! We can tell the boys were not too comfortable because through out the early evening they were fussy and sweaty.....we felt horrible that we could do nothing, short of packing everything up and going to a motel. We thought, if we could get them to sleep, we could tough it out.

Tracy became concerned about the many many many ounces of frozen breast milk that sit in the freezer. So instead of wasting all that hard earned pumped gold...we decided to locate a freezer that was currently being powered. We called our friends Tim and Janet (who live in Burbank w/ power) told them our predicament and they were extremely kind to let us use their 2nd freezer, as a temporary home for the liquid gold, my boys call food. They were also kind and offered for us to sleep there, but i declined saying the boys were sleeping already, and if they can stick it out....so can we. At 8:45 I took off for burbank and was back in 40min to sit in the 90degree sauna we called home that night. We hung out for a little bit and i gave in and wanted to go to bed, just to take the heat off my mind, as I was growing more and more irritated with the situation. Since the windows were wide open in the boys room we thought it would be nice in this situation if one of us slept on the floor in the room with them. Tracy opted to do so. Lucky for her...it was the 'lesser of the hot rooms'. I on the other hand slept in the hotter room. Didn't get much sleep...either of us. Tracy, getting up frequently to nurse and console, me tossing, turning, sweating, tossing, sweating....and finally taking a cold shower at 12am to help...well it didn't help. IT WAS COMPLETELY UNBEARABLE!!!! I fell asleep chanting to myself "the power will be back on in the morning, the power will be back on in the morning" the good ol' "Secret" method...even though i don't buy that stuff...i figured, what the heck.

At 6:15 AM I woke up to the sound of birds chirping their melodies, christmas bells, and angels singing...or that's what the sound of electricity kicking back on sounded like to me at that point in time. I shot out of bed like it was christmas morning and I was 5 years old. turning on lights as if it was a miracle from the heavens. I checked the thermostat at which point I wondered why we were so hot during the evening....the temperature dropped all the way to a cool 86 degrees. HAH! well needless to say the A/C has been cranking all day and is still not down to 80 degrees and it is now 10pm on saturday. But it's a cool 80 as opposed to no A/C and it being a hot 100.
I told tracy if it happens again....we are finding a cool place to spend the day and evening. I will not subject the boys to something like this ever again if I can control it.