No Complaining

11:30 last night, as I lay tossing and turning desperate to go to sleep, Russ out for his two hour deep sleep, I heard a loud grumbling. It was a mechanical sound, like a tractor trailer idling outside my window. Worried that there was something wrong with our HVAC system so I got up to go explore. Out in the hall I flicked on the overhead light and it glowed an eerie gray green color. I heard the sound of the robot vacuum running in Russ’ nursery turned office.

Why was the vacuum running? I bent to push the off button, leaving the vacuum in place. With it off I thought the grumbling sound might subside, but it didn’t. I walked to the top of the stairs and looked down to the thermostat. The front hall lights go out automatically at different times every night. The thermostat normally lights up when you come down the stairs activated by your motion. Instead of showing me the orange glow of “heat on” mode with a temperature setting I saw a black and white picture of a wrench and hammer crossed over each other indicating something was broken.

How could the relatively new HVAC, be broken? I went down another set of stairs to the mechanical room, no sound. I flicked on that light switch, same gray green haunted-house semi-glow. That bad mechanical sound that had awoken me was not coming from inside my house. Thankfully, the scary movie feeling was starting to subside.

I opened the door to the garage and no noise was coming from there, but strangely the light on the dryer was on and I could not get it to go off. Something was off, but I couldn’t figure it out and I was just so tired and wanted to go to sleep, but the noise, that damn growling truck sound, what was it.

I walked back to my bedroom and by the time I got there the hall light was out. Who turned it off? Russ was still sound asleep. Then it dawned on me. The power was out. That sound I heard was big ass automatic generations from at least three of my neighbors.

I picked up my phone, it had not been on the charger very long and I had just a few percent change. I pulled up the Duke energy app to report a power outage. I was not the first. The app said it would be fixed by 3:45 AM. I wrapped two pillows around my head to drown out the growl and eventually fell asleep.

Shay woke me at 7:00. Still no power. Russ had gone out to pick up breakfast, not wanting to open the refrigerator. He told me Duke said it would be noon before power. He left for his new office. I went to the dentist. Both of us looked like we didn’t have power.

I got another text from Duke. 7:00PM we would get power. I stopped believing them. They were wrong again, it came back on around 5:15.

When I asked Russ about the revolt of the machines and the gray green lights he explained that one leg of the transformer had blown first so we were only getting partial power before the whole transformer went. Oh it’s so nice to have an electrical engineer as a husband, otherwise I might have thought we would have to sell the house.Thankfully now the growling is gone.

I am feeling a little guilty complaining about not having power for 18 hours when in Ukraine people are enduring unimaginable terror as well as no power, water or food. The growling of generators is nothing compared to the sounds of bombs. I am going to try and keep this little inconvenient in perspective.