I woke up this morning, staggered into the kitchen to fix some coffee, and looked out the window at the thermometer.
Weather.com had advised the evening before that I could expect the temperature to get down to 8 degrees.
We should have been so fortunate.
The temperature was 5 degrees below zero. I immediately got chilled. We have two heat pumps keeping the house nice and toasty in the wintertime and they were running full blast just to keep up. My thought was, after half a cup of coffee got my brain to actually functioning, "Man, am I glad we didn't lose power."
And then the electricity went off.
Five degrees below and we have no heat.
Paula and I learned a valuable lesson a number of years ago when we lived in Hartland, Michigan (This was the first time we lived in Michigan. We didn't learn anything about the great frozen north that time so we moved there again several years later.). On Christmas Day, 1984 the temperature hit a bone-numbing 20 below zero. Our house was heated with fuel oil. It got so cold, the fuel oil turned to jello and clogged the line going to the furnace. On Christmas Day. Imagine our ... consternation trying to find a repairman. On Christmas Day.
Well, from that day forward, Paula and I have always had plenty of alternate sources of heat. Today we gave both the fireplace and the kerosene heater a good workout.
And we survived. Finally, after eight hours of living like pioneers (we heated water for coffee on top of the kerosene heater), the power came back on.
I write this in part to tell the fine workers at the power company to please disregard the threatening voice message I left on your machine. I was only kidding. I realize you are not the people I want to have mad at me right now. What with Christmas Day coming.
