Things to Do When the Power Comes Back On the Coldest Day of the Year

It was Saturday, February 13th 2016. It was 21 degrees below zero celsius. Bruce I and were chatting over breakfast, sorting out the day ahead of us. We were hosting the condo's annual general meeting on Tuesday night; our house was in ruins and we needed to tidy up.

Suddenly, there was a house-shaking BLAM and a flash.

This had happened a couple of weeks ago. A transformer across the street had blown. Last time this happened, thanks to the redundancies in the system, our power was back on in less than three minutes. It looked like this was going to be the case this time. After the BLAM, flash and sudden creepy silence that descends on a home without power, the power came back on.

"God bless Toronto Hydro," I said.

Then, ominously, the house fell silent again.

We cracked open the front door so as not to let too much freezing cold air in. Yes, there was a blasted transformer and, more importantly, a fallen high tension wire snaking along the bike lane on Sherbourne. Because the wire was down, they had to shut off the back up systems.

We reasonably expected that we would not see power again for a while. Using the water still hot from our gas water heater and keeping ourselves warm with our gas fireplace and our exertions, we washed the kitchen, hallway and dining room floors, dusted all the rooms and scrubbed the surfaces in the kitchen.

We checked every once in a while to see what was going on across the street.

The progression of emergency vehicles around the fallen wire went like this: first, the fire trucks, with fire men who went, "yup, that's a high tension wire in the bike lane," and then the police cruisers who brought police men who decorated the sidewalk and bike lane around the wire with bright yellow DANGER bunting, and then a guy in an electrical contractors truck, who exchanged the DANGER bunting for hazard cones. This fellow sat in the truck for a couple of hours, keeping an eye on the fallen wire, until the Hydro truck came with the replacement transformer and guys who knew what to do with the wire.

The power went off shortly after eight in the morning. It came on again around two in the afternoon.

By then, we were ready to use our recently restored power to vacuum the living room, haul out all the furniture and wash the floor for the first time in ... I dunno ... maybe a couple of years.

Those who have visited us know our living room is at the level of our outdoor patio. A few of you may have noticed that the patio gets kind of buggy in the summer. The sharp-eyed among those few may have also noticed that a lot of those bugs are spiders.

So here's the thing. Spiders like the indoors when the weather gets cold. Especially when they are female spiders and they need to find a sheltered place to leave their egg sacs - things that seem so sweet and appealing when the spider's name is Charlotte, but....

Operating on a hunch, I asked Bruce to help me flip over all the furniture in the living room - including the tv table and even the little magazine rack. I'd seen tell-tale marks on the floor. I thought there might be a spider or two lurking under our furniture.

Make that a hundred or two. The double-seater right by the patio doors was the worst, closely followed by the TV table. Dozens and dozens of egg sacs all lovingly laced to the undersides, thickly coated in hobbit-grade spider webs. Ick.

Once that horror had been gobbled up by the vacuum cleaner, I had one last thing to do now that the power was back on.

When the transformer had blown the last time, I'd had to nurse my iMac back to life. Even though it's plugged into a surge protector, the poor little thing wouldn't power back up right away. I'd had to mutter some spells, hold some buttons down, unplug and replug it a couple of times then go away and pray. Last time, this had worked.

This time, nothing worked. So, added to the list of things to do on the coldest day of the year after the power came back on was to get a new computer and hope someone could extract the data from my inert and lifeless five-year old machine.

It's one week later and I still don't have that new computer - although I've already paid for it, twice - and it'll be another week before I have it loaded with all my data. That's another story.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen