One Long Day with No Power

Yesterday was one very annoying day. We lost power and for approximately 20 hours, we sat here twiddling our thumbs.

So here’s how it went. It poured outside during Friday evening. It rained so hard that I could here the sheets of water hitting the roof. I took at look at the weather forecast to see what was going on and what was going to happen overnight and I saw that a line of thunderstorms was rolling through. As far as I could tell, the primary disturbance was directly on top of us. I’m guessing it was around 9pm.

We went to bed thinking it was all over. Around 1am, I woke up to a whole lot of wind. When I say wind, I mean “wind that takes the roof off the house” wind. The whole place was shaking and I swear I thought something terrible was going to happen. The wind continued for a while and I eventually fell back asleep. About an hour later, I heard the power go off…and then on…and then off again. I was like, “Uggg. Not this again.” For some reason though, I had confidence that it would come back on in a short while. It didn’t.

We woke up in the morning and I was highly agitated because we originally had a big day of hiking with friends planned. It was beautiful and clear outside. With the power off, it meant that I couldn’t contact these friends to tell them what was up. Laura and I drove down to Farmington and I emailed one of them, so that was good. At least I told him what was going on. What really stunk was that we had to go back to the house so I could hook up the generator. Just the day before, we went food shopping and we had a refrigerator and freezer full of food. I didn’t want to lose any of it. So that’s what we did. We sat at the house waiting for the power to come back on, the entire day.

Around 10pm, it did finally come back on. We were eating dinner at the table, by candlelight (which was very nice, by the way), when it clicked back on. What a relief. But what was especially frustrating was that we had just wasted a perfectly good day. We had planned on going back up to Poplar Falls for some photography and video. I was looking forward to it very much.

During some of our driving around looking for downed trees and power lines, of which there were none, we passed by our lake. I’m pretty sure I told you this before, but I’ll say it again. We have the most beautiful lake in the world here. Every single time I drive by this lake, I tell myself how lucky I am to have it so close by. It’s truly a Maine lake that you can imagine in your dreams.

We decided to stop and take some more pictures. This type of thing really never gets old. There was a light fog above the lake that I’m assuming was created by some sort of temperature difference between the air and the water. It was beautiful. Here’s the first shot I took.

Here’s another where I zoomed in on the white pine trees across the water. The area is really far away, so it’s a bit grainy.

And finally, I have one last shot of a couple who were standing around a fire pit in their back yard. I wonder if they had any idea I was taking photos of them. It certainly was a beautiful evening.

Stopping off and taking some pictures was a nice distraction from my frustrated mood. The good news is that it’s supposed to be just as sunny on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week coming up as it was on Saturday. But, or course, it could snow those days. After all, Maine is part of New England. These things tend to happen up here.