Pass the French bread, please

Merry Christmas. It has happened once again…or I should say, “It is happening once again.” And as it is with most older folks, I have memories of Christmas’s past; lots of them!

But this Christmas season is already memorable and will be forever known as the time of the Christmas Eve Power Failure. It was close to 5 last night and I was busy cooking a great spaghetti sauce for our anticipated guests, the beets for today’s side dish were roasting in the oven and all was well with the world. And then the lights went out…mid simmer. And there was an indefinable “certainty” to the failure. I knew instantly that they were going to be out for a long time. How did I know that?

There’s not a lot of light available at 5 PM these days and we were soon in to the candles and flashlights. I did walk outside to see if I could tell how far the power outage had spread, but I could only guess, so I turned the scanner radio on to see if I could hear something that would let me know what was happening. All I heard was a request to put out some detour signs for Highway 32 because, “it looked like it would be awhile”.

My guess was that we had a pole-car incident, or a car-pole incident. The difference being who hit whom. And a later phone call to David confirmed that a car had, indeed, removed a power pole from its rightful place in terra firma and that he and a crew were on their way from Willows, that very minute, (8 PM) with a new pole in tow behind their truck. He also said it might be 2 AM before the power was back on. But, he also said that they were trying for a goal of midnight, maybe?

That was when we decided to get in the car and head towards Orland to see what the chances were for a midnight service at the church. I took the back roads as I knew they had blocked Highway 32. Surprise! The power was on in the town and apparently the severed pole had only affected those to the east and to the north of the highway…that would be us and our neighbors.

With that information, we returned home to await the 11 o’clock hour before returning to the church for the candlelight service. (How appropriate) And we did just that and it was great! Superb in fact. I do love this church! We then returned home at 12:30 (Merry Christmas!) and found that the lights were still off so I filled the stove with wood and we went to bed.

I woke up quite early (I had been napping off and on during the outage) to find the house ablaze with lights and the clocks flashing. So I turned off the lights, put another log on the fire, made some coffee and re-booted the computer. Here I am…my electric world is whole again. And my spaghetti sauce is simmering once more. Smells great!