Spent The Night At My Older Daughter's House

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RSteve

RSteve

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Thursday night 70+mph winds blew through MN. Power lines were knocked down all over the state. I was awakened yesterday morning with my hard wired/battery backup CO2-smoke alarms screaming to get out of the house. They go off in that manner when the electric power is out and they're running on battery. I have several in the house. In between the voice announcements, there's loud audible beeping. I still don't have power and there's no way I'd get a minute of sleep with all the alarms going off.

My car is in the garage because the electric opener is inoperable. I could have disconnected the opener and opened the garage door manually, but reconnecting it is a pain in the butt that usually takes two people. In the past, when this has happened, I've hooked up an inverter to the car battery, connected the garage door opener and run the car while the door opens. It inevitably stinks up the house for a couple of days and it was easier just to have my daughter pick me up.

My younger daughter woke up to the sound of a tree toppling over on her attached garage. Her husband stayed home from work calling the insurance company and tree removal companies. He related that storm chasing tree removal companies knocked on his door all day. He said the insurance company said they were going to operate via zoom to see the damage. I advised him to get an independent adjuster to completely survey the damage to the garage. My son in law said it appeared that the garage foundation and slab may have been cracked when the tree toppled, because the tree roots had grown under the garage over several years.

I'm not at all surprised that the tree had toppled over. The way it had grown, it was leaning toward the garage and all it really took was a stiff wind to knock it over.
 
My next door neighbor doesn't have a battery back-up for his sump pump. He's on the road for a week. His wife says there' not too much water in their basement.
 
Power outages suck. When I lived in the Pac NW outages were measured in days, not hours. Many was the time I was out for 2 or 3 days, with 6 being the longest. Some folks were out for weeks.


No Cheers,

RR
 
Brewdude said:
Power outages suck. When I lived in the Pac NW outages were measured in days, not hours. Many was the time I was out for 2 or 3 days, with 6 being the longest. Some folks were out for weeks. No Cheers, RR
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Had the outage lasted much longer, I'd have pulled my generator out of the garage. Across the street they had power hours earlier. I have sufficient extension cords to reach a neighbor's exterior electric outlet through a side door to my house. I'd have done that to power up the garage door.
 
It took me 10 years of living there until I wised up enough to get a generator. Guess I'm a slow learner! Even then, I still had to use my wood burning fireplace to heat the house as I had an electric furnace and the generator was not large enough to power it.


No Cheers,

RR
 
For about 30 years I had the same next door neighbor, a widow living alone. She was in her late 80s when her sons put her into a nursing home, even though she wanted to stay in her house. The year before she went to the nursing home, she and I were going to split the cost of a natural gas Generac generator that automatically kicked in if the power went out.
The day she went to live in the nursing home, we talked and cried for a bit. She said she didn't think she'd live six months in the nursing home. Three months later, I got word that she had died. Her sons said they felt it was necessary to put her in the nursing home because she smoked a couple of cigarettes a day and enjoyed a daily martini. They were afraid that she'd have a drink and fall asleep with a lit cigarette.

I was outside one day, having a cocktail and a cigar on my deck, when she called from her backyard, "Are you serving old women?" I said, of course and told her I'd go in the house and bring her a vodka martini, her cocktail of choice. Then she called out, "See if you can find a cigarette." I didn't have any cigarettes, but I did have a box of filtered tubes designed for use in a rolling machine. I brought out her martini, some pipe tobacco and a couple of tubes. Very slowly, I filled a tube, constantly tamping it to compress the tobacco. When I gave it to her to smoke, I was expecting a quite different response from the one I got. "This is wonderful. Can you make me another one?"

Had she not gone to the nursing home, she might still be alive. Her older son, at the funeral, said putting her in the nursing home was a terrible mistake. I should add that she had no choice about going to a nursing home. Several years earlier, for estate tax purposes, she'd "sold" the house to her sons. They sold it out from under her.
 
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