Electrifying End to 2011

In case anyone was wondering why I’ve been AWOL the last several days here’s the reason. Remember my complaining about the cable? There was an issue with the cable & it was fixed, but our problem had very little to do with the cable. The neighbor’s tree has been rubbing on the electrical line and shorted out the neutral wire & it arched. When that happened, it...I can’t remember the technical term but it caused the grounding wire to spazz &the jolt was so strong that it shook it loose from the cable AND power box and melted it to all the other wires around it. Well, not all of the wires…one of them exploded.  We didn’t know this because it was dark. Not just dark but can-barely-see-your-hand dark. When the meltdown happened, the lights in the house got runway bright then went out accompanied by various sounds of crackling, popping and snapping then went out. When it came back on it was less than half power but strong enough for us to see the smoke coming from the VCR and then the TV (Granny had gotten that for Mama & Pop for their anniversary in ’91).

As luck would have it, our neighbor (not the one with the offending tree) James’ son-in-law is an electrician. God bless Hymie, he came over to a stranger’s house at 8:30 PM and spent an hour trying to fix it and told us he was 99% sure it was the neutral wire at the pole & to call the electric company in the AM. Then he spent another hour & a half making sure the house was safe. So we pretty much camped in the house. For the record, I don’t like extreme quiet and at 38 yrs old I’m scared of the dark…it was both quiet and dark.

When the electric company came out the next morning and confirmed that yes, it was the neutral wire & they fixed it. Comcast came out & fixed their box & the guy from Comcast said he’d seen this before but the house had caught fire & the fella from Gulf Power was amazed that the house didn’t burn down.

Aside from the TV & VCR in the living room, my desktop computer, VCR/DVD player & stereo, the exhaust fan in the kitchen, and the radio in the bathroom were lost. The refrigerator was injured…did ya’ll know they put motherboards (that’s what the tech compared it to) in refrigerators? Me neither. Well ours took a hit and thankfully it’s about half what we thought it was going to cost.

Now, before you think the whole thing was awful, think again…remember, this is me you’re dealing with. There have been several times when we, no joke, fell out laughing. For instance, when Hymie and Pop were checking to see if there was any power in the house; they kept flipping breakers, plugging and unplugging everything in sight only to discover they hadn’t turned the power back on at the main box. Or when Pop was checking out his computer and was getting no signal to the monitor, he was sure it was lost, then decided it was the monitor…and realized he hadn’t reconnected the monitor to the computer after checking my old computer.

This all started Wednesday night and for the most part, it’s over. The fridge won’t be fixed until maybe Tuesday, but probably Wednesday. My computer wasn’t exactly great…it was about 8 years old and a transformer blew outside 3 years ago & it hadn’t been the same since (I’m pretty much all laptop now). Pop had wanted a big TV for when they room is finished so he’s playing with his new toy – a 55 inch TV. A perk; the sensor on my TV stopped working a few months ago so no remote control would work at all but it seems the power jolt fixed it. All in all, considering the house could have burned down, things turned out pretty good.