Power Outage

Yesterday afternoon at 3:38pm San Diego county, parts of Tijuana and Arizona lost power.  At first I was thinking that it was a rolling brown out due to high temperatures and high power usage.  Turns out a series of events caused two power plants to go off line.  This event really got us thinking how unprepared we are in the event of a catastrophic emergency.

Kaylee did great during the outage, especially when it got dark.  She ran around with a flashlight and played with neighbor's dog.  She got to eat ice cream, chips and quacamole, and a warm fruit cup for dinner.  She would ask to watch Mickey Mouse, but seemed to understand that we weren't able to due to no power.  For bedtime we read books by flashlight and she quickly fell asleep since she had no nap.

Today we are still under a boil water warning and conserve energy request.  We are using bottled water for teeth brushing, and open windows and fans for cooling.  The power returned at 2:30am and the sound of all our electronics waking up woke us up.  It was like a zap of life to our house.  The food in the refrigerator and freezer remained cold.  We did throw out left over food, milk, and lunch meet.  The frozen meets remained solid at the bottom of the freezer.  So we didn't lose as much food as we thought we would (I went grocery shopping yesterday).

It is business as usual today for Kaylee and I, we are going to babysit the Williams kids.  All schools are closed, so Curtis is home.  Curtis wants to stock up on batteries, and get a battery powered radio (we were listening to the radio out in the car).  I think we should get a water filter, a travel sized one that is a super filter for camping.

And here is a question, if we had a solar panel system, would we have been able to continue our cooking or laundry (our underwear was in the wash, so no undies for us last night ... T.M.I right?) that I was in the middle of when the power turned off?

Yesterdays power outage was a good wake up call for us to be better prepared.  But it was a nice evening, almost romantic (we brought in our solar outdoor lights and stuck them in our plants).  We had a bright moon, and it was very, very quiet.