At about 7:30 am, I was sitting feeding Rebecca and the power went out. When it didn't come back on within a few minutes, I had a bad feeling that it was going to take a while. I went on Southern California Edison's website and reported the outage. Then, I took the baby on a walk around the neighborhood with complete faith that the power would be back on by the time we got back.
While I was out, I got a text update from Edison that said they expected the power to be out until 3 pm. Oh great, an entire day without power. This was going to be a challenge. Most of the morning, we all just sat around and stared at each other. We hadn't planned on taking Rebecca out in public (other than doctor appointments) until she was 7 or 8 weeks old. But, we decided to venture out for lunch so we didn't go nuts. So, her first official non-medical outing was to Taco Bell. Very exciting!
While we were at lunch, we got another update that they were now expecting the power to be out until 4:30. Oh boy...more waiting. At that point, we also became concerned about the groceries in the fridge. Of course, I had just gone shopping the day before and stocked up. According to all the food safety websites, most of it would have to be thrown out at this point to be safe. Here we are trying to be frugal and now we have to trash a bunch of food.
Just after 3:00, we got another update that they were now expecting the power to be out until 7 am the following morning! OK, now this was getting ridiculous! How on earth am I supposed to take care of a newborn baby, overnight, in the dark. I had no hot water - no way to sterilize the bottles or wash my hands properly or anything. We decided to go to a hotel for the night.
Here's where we began to feel very vagabondish (moving from place to place - wandering). We went to a nearby hotel that looked decent from the outside. We schlep all the necessary baby stuff up to the room and the keys don't work. Mike walks back to the office and gets new ones. We walk in the room and it smelled foul. Seriouly foul. Then Mike notices gross mildewy stains all over the ceiling and the bathroom was moldy all over the ceiling. SO gross.
Mike went back to the office to switch rooms and we moved ALL the stuff to the other side of the hotel. Let me say that through this entire crazy day, our girl was so well behaved. She didn't cry or fuss. It's like she knew I was going to lose it and decided to be nice and not add to it. We are very proud of her behavior!
So we got into a new room and got cleaned up. Around this time, I got another text. This one said they were now updating the expected time to 7 pm on TUESDAY!!! So now we were talking about 3 full days of power outage. I was freaking out. I just knew we were in for a miserable few days. A few minutes later, while we were trying to figure things out, Mike happened to go on Edison's website and noticed our zip code was no longer listed under Current Outages. What did that mean? I just got the Tuesday text. We decided to swing by the house and see if it happened to be back on. Sure enough, the power was back! Rejoice!
Of course, that means we just wasted about $80 on the hotel, but I didn't care at that point - I was just thrilled that we would have the convenience of being in our own home for the night. The Vagabond family had been back and forth all day long, but we were finally back home.
This morning, I went back and did more grocery shopping to replace all the potentially spoiled food. Though their website says they "generally" don't allow claims for food loss, etc. due to power outage, I still plan on making a claim against Edison because I am so annoyed!
So, here are a couple of pictures from this morning of our perfecty well behaved vagabond baby. I took these 3 in a row trying to get a decent one. I thought it was funny to see them all. Enjoy!
No comments:
Post a Comment