Life, Interrupted: A Large Tree Fell... AGAIN!

It was late afternoon, and all of a sudden our electricity went off.

Now, I've written about this before, and it's not an uncommon occurrence during fall and winter storms. This was a little different, because today was bright and sunny, and no wind at all.

It being a nice sunny day (we've had very FEW of those!),* we sat outside and just enjoyed the summer air. In time, I looked up the power company's twitter feed on my phone... and wouldn't you know it? A very large tree had fallen across a major feeder line and had left 7,800 households without electricity.

Annoying? Perhaps...

But sometimes it's actually a good thing to be offered a reason to step away from the electronics and instead pay attention to our surroundings.

Because there is always something to see!

The strawberries are in full bloom, but they are ever so late this year. At this time last year, we were enjoying the first berries of the season... this year, we only have a few small berries in the green stage.

Ants had gotten into the hummingbird feeder!

Very clever things, ants. Somehow, they had managed to scale down a thin wire hanging from our top deck, then scale down the side of the glass container holding the nectar, and finally make their way in through the small drinking holes for the birds. I don't think we would have noticed, except for the fact that there were suddenly drowned ants floating around inside the container.

We cleaned it up and hung it anew. This time with a "natural" deterrent that's also very effective: a layer of powdered cayenne pepper on the lid of the feeder. Ants really don't like that stuff, and don't want to cross it.

After tending to a few more outside tasks, I checked the power company again on twitter, and there were no new news apart from an update stating that "crews are working on the problem."

So I sat down and had a look at Steemit... and realized that I must really be getting old, because I just couldn't picture how anyone could possibly create and post to the community from their phone!

And yet? There are lots of people who do all their online work from their phone. I guess it's all a matter of what you're used to, as well.

The power eventually came back on around 9:20pm... just as we were getting ready to work out which lights we would turn on, in expectation of darkness. About 4 hours... all told. Not too bad!

Once again, I was reminded of the way we probably take our modern conveniences for granted... rather more than we perhaps ought to. So I paused for a moment to send a few thoughts of gratitude to the repair crews of the electric company... and felt relieved that I remembered to pay the power bill, yesterday!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great week!

How about YOU? Ever stop and think about our modern conveniences... and what it's like to NOT have them? Do leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — NOT A CROSSPOST!!!)
Created at 20220627 22:57 PDT
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