Give Thanks...Modern Conveniences

We believe it was a scheduled outage, mostly because the second after the power went out, I got a phone call from the power company. Thinking it was spam, I let the call go to voice-mail. Sure enough, it was the power company calling to inform us of the outage in our area.

This year was different...we were prepared.

Of course, no one can be fully prepared for the events of life. Years ago, the power went out on our street after a huge windstorm. After several days without power, we started throwing out all the food in our freezer. Turns out, it wasn't the worst thing to have happened because a few months after, we moved and I don't know how much of that food we threw out we would have taken with us.

I remember talking to our neighbors on the cul-de-sac and asked them how they were doing living in the Nineteenth Century. They were doing fine--they threw away no food because we were apparently the only family on the street without an alternative power generating source.

With one of our stimulus checks, we invested in Twentieth Century technology. We bought a small little generator at Costco. It was on sale. We brought it home, stuck the box in a corner and forgot about it. We knew we had it and we'd use it in the case of an emergency. The phone message from the power company  last week said we'd only be out of power for a few hours. We decided to give the little Firman Generator a test run.

Following the instructions, I dug it out of the box, filled it with oil, then gasoline, took placed it at least 20' away from the house and started it up.

We had power!

We've never had a generator before. The closest thing was having an electrical outlet in our Pontiac Vibe (we used that car as a generator when the power went out for days...). Last week, we charged some devices, and when lunch time came around, we fired up the microwave oven.

I'm grateful to have an option, which is really all it is. Still, if we go without power for days, we'll be able to save the food in our fridge, which could save us a lot of money. I'm grateful for having this first-world problem and solving it with a first-world solution.