Taking Things in Stride

These two were with their dad waiting for their drinks in the Trail House. He was pointing out various landmarks on the big map on the wall. They appeared to be dancing even when they were standing still, and then they went over to the big empty space which once held tables and comfy chairs and started dancing! And they were pros! They put a smile on my face on a day that was otherwise a slow descent into red flag heat warnings, power shutoff notifications, filling water bottles and taking naps!

The power may be shut off tomorrow morning some time between 2 and 6am and is scheduled to be restored by 7pm on Wednesday. It's ironic that this is the very same day that Ali is, was?  supposed to come back and try to find the broken circuit to the well pump in our attic. It must be a million degrees up there. The irony lies in the fact that it was the power shutoffs almost a year ago that cut off our water and convinced us to install the storage battery as a back up power source.  An additional irony is that everything on the critical panel works as it should, except the line to the well pump. We elected not to put the air conditioning on the critical panel because it draws a lot of electricity. When cooler heads (and weather) prevailed we figured we would rather have WiFi and the television and the fridge, and some lights. We'll find out....what actually works....

We decided the hell with the suggestion that we 'conserve' power during peak hours (3-10pm) and have had our Air conditioning running almost all day. They can't have it both ways....if they're going to turn it off during a heat wave, we're going to use whatever we can get for as long as we can. Dana doesn't know how the power shutdown will affect her school. She won't be able to teach from her dining room table. And a lot of her students won't be able to learn from theirs either.

Needless to say, this is a perfect storm of failures and disasters and everybody is getting very short tempered and tired. We didn't stay very long at Trail House because it was already 80º at 9am and the sky has filled with smoke again. The boys were still dancing when we left....