Gaki n Me Five days living without power

Okay, okay, I'm back.  I didn't disappear from the face of the earth because my state has a severe blackout since Thursday night with 65mph wind and knocking out power lines throughout the state, nor did I disappear because I suddenly got tired of Kinki Kids.  I disappeared because I had no power to my house and as my daughter told me as she listened on the radio that the rich districts would get power back on Saturday noon and by now, I realize I don't live in the rich district but perhaps one of the poorest? hahahahaha.

 
The kids entertained themselves with making candles as I used to when I was bored when little.

So while my husband was away in Spain for a university conference, I took up as the protector and entertainer, soul soother for my three kids if not for myself. Good lord, we don't have a lantern at home and by 4 pm, my state turns dark in these months and so I sent everyone to bed with no heat. The temperature outside plummeted to 20 degrees Fahrenheit which is your -6 degrees in Centigrade. Inside, it was slightly 45 degrees Fahrenheit. By 10.30 pm, I woke up and have a headache from sleeping too much considering I only sleep for 4 or 5 hours every night as I run the forum.  So the kids were up in the dark and luckily we have a few torch lights.  So what did we do at that hour? Junk food, and playing the guitar.  I strummed my out of tune guitar to Scarborough Fair (my youngest son favorite song) and my daughter groaned and howled above my voice as I sang, "M O M, you are worse than Tsuyoshi!!!" Kinki Kids fans perhaps should not read this for the rest of two days were my kids imitating Tsuyoshi and singing, imitating, pretending how bad he looked and sounded.   Koichi in fact got the better treatment. 

 
Nearby house has an uprooted tree

Videos of my daughter playing the piano entertaining herself and her youngest brother
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWdSTX2hUSg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Aw2HW6tUL0

Now, I'm usually one who is quite adept at trying new things even though I don't know a whole lot about mechanical stuff.  For one entire day we were without music because no matter how many radios I put in the fresh pack of D batteries, I couldn't get them to work.  Then at 5 am the first night, the house alarm system left by a previous Boeing lawyer sounded telling us there was power failure. Yeah, right. Need we be notified rudely 10 hours later? Good lord....so I looked at these two green neon panel of numbers and alphabets prompting me to key in the code beeping urgently beep beep beep beep...  What code? Shoot, I don't have a code.  I punched numbers here and there, anywhere but the police station button....gosh, I was sweating it...for 5 mins it was still not working.  So I got a Philips screwrdriver and unhooked it and suddenly, the words turned to 3rd entryway intercepted....3rd entryway intercepted.....XXXX ....shoot....., if it were Jet Li, all he needed to was punch his fist in it to disarm it but I'm not, and I didn't plan to hurt my knuckles. Besides, how does he disarm both at the same time?  I clip both wires. The green light went off. Phew....then suddenly a siren blasted through my house....OMG OMG....I've triggered the alarm!!! The police would be coming...the neighbors would be woken up, the security would be here... I was terrified because the siren was really shrill and hurting my ears....the thought of locating and disarming the alarm scared me....I think my heart pulsed quite a bit faster as I hurried around the house to look for this every 15 seconds siren....and when I found it, holy crap...it was on a midstair landing...OMG, how am I going to unhook it?   Yeah, at that moment, I didn't think of using violence, like a hammer as my son suggested after the incident.  I dont' usually do things the violent way and I know I could not destroy the sheet rock that is part of the wall or I would get an earful from my husband.

So running back up in the dark to the garage, I looked for a ladder.  My two Volvos were stuck inside the garage and manoeuvring them is first a problem, plus I have to gauge which ladder. Tall, medium, or short step one.  OMG, in the meantime, that siren was scaring the heck out of me....

I grabbed the short step one, put it on the landing....and told my youngest son to hold on to it with his life and not let me fall.  "I need to go pee, mom...I need to go pee..." Where's my other two kids???  "Go, go pee! quick!" Yeah, if my husband were here, I would have held onto to the ladder even if I had to pee.

Then I realized it was the wrong side of the box...It was screwed at on the bottom side of the steps....phew, I could handle that.  "Hold on to my ladder!" I commanded to one of the kids who finally appeared and after some jiggling, I managed to disentangle it.  By now, without thinking, I know I have to clip the wires, it didn't matter which. Clip. Yay! silence. Then an even louder siren sounded.....OMXXXG....This one was amplified 10 times louder....I was ready to cry...where was it from, where...OMG....I don't dare disarm the other green panel in case I couldn't disarm correctly, some security or police might be able to still punch some numbers....

I ran around the house looking for the source of that  blasted siren which sounded louder than a fire engine...and finally realized it was outside.  OMG....It has rained all day and it was dark outside.  The sound come from an area that was with rocky landscaping.  I was ready to faint.  This is how people get killed. If my husband were here, he might be hurt.  I had to proceed very carefully. But where the heck was this blasted loudspeaker.  I shone the torch light into the eaves and under the roof, back up the porch and the balcony and when I couldn't find the source, I almost broke down because it meant it might be on the roof...and I don't do ladders and climbing very well.

Gulp.

As I headed to fetch the tallest ladder in the garage, I suddenly thought about the attic.  So with less than one inch space of placing the ladder against shelving and my car, I climbed up a near vertical ladder to the attic. I have been to the attic once in California when I had to see what a worker what work he planned to do, (Why me again?, because my husband also happened to be conveniently out of town in Singapore procuring a house for us to move into and I was in charge of quick repairs before we rented the house out and this job required the foreman to tell me how he planned to balance the sagging of the ceiling out...and so I had to climb up the middle sized ladder....but this ladder was the tall one and near vertical....*nearly died*) I don't know if you readers have ever lived in a house before but in the US, we have insulation material and this particular owner probably has insulated this ceiling with almost two feet worth of fluffy stuff.  I was terrified when my foot sunk in and almost never came back up on the first step.  What if there were rats?? hahahaha...So one hand hanging on with my dear life along the beams, I walked on the single planks tightrope style.  The siren was definitely from here but I couldn't see it because some wise ass decided to shield it from view with ornamental planks at 45 degrees and a two feet tall crawl space.  This insulation material could be toxic if you inhale enough of it and if I were 8 months pregnant, I would have never crawled through, nor my poor husband at his near senior age.  Lucky it was me and not him who had to do this.  And there you go, after crawling on my hands and knees, I saw the damn megaphone facing outward towards the slitted window.  Clip.

Sigh...that was too much excitement.  I slept fitfully all night fearing that another alarm would sound again.  But luckily the rest of the nights, there were fewer incidents of surprise. Only that our Christmas tree broke.  I found a gas stove that uses canisters and figured out how to light it.   The next afternoon, I figured out how to use the outdoor gas grill nearly incinerating my right hand as I threw in the match too slowly when the whole thing was filled with propane gas.  I finally figured out how to unhook the cable from my boom boxes in order for the Made in China equipment to detect that it needed to operate on battery power and so on the second night onwards, we had music on top of piano music and parody of Tsuyoshi's music.  And I have to tell you, the music that saved my kids' sanity was not Usher, nor L'arc en ciel, nor Kinki Kids.  It was V6.  I cannot say enough thanks to this group as we listened to their Very Best V6 and MusicMind, how uplifting it was, and how energetic we felt.  We kept hitting the fast forward button on Kinki Kid's I Album and after the first round, we never put it in again. My kids seem to be able to tell what are good encouraging songs, songs with a general theme and what is not and I haven't  even told them the lyrics of each song which I had been studying intensely before the blackout. This once again proves that Kinki Kids need to find a different direction or different composers, lyricists to widen their appeal. 


As soon as everyone turned to wood fire, you see the pollution in the sunset.

By Sunday, the kids really hoped for the power to come back on so my sons could play their virtual games and my daughter could check her live journal where she posts her crack stories of Kame and Jin and get 20 comments a day.  I in the meantime read a  young Samurai story  to them that hooked them so much that my voice were almost going coarse every night....

My only failure throughout this blackout? That I didn't know there was a manual latch to open the garage door so that I could take the car out and pick up my husband from the airport.  He sat there waiting for four hours for me.  (We live in near stone age here having discontinued using cell phones.)  

The majority of the state got their power back on Saturday, with local pockets without power until Tuesday midnight. We got it one night earlier.  Our problem was a localized problem.  A tree fell on a power line. It's not that we live in the poor area.  In fact our city got their power back on Saturday morning (before the rich districts) but some areas like ours had unforseen damage.  We also were very lucky because my house has gas water heater and gas furnaces on top of a central electric heating system. So we had hot water to make our instant noodles, gas to power our fireplaces though I dare not put it on all night....(don't ask me why, I'm just too skittish about mechanical things.) A lot of people had to go to shelters because their homes do not have any other heating alternatives.  All in all, this had been quite an experience.  One worth talking about many years to come. We would always remember the silly Matrix like jan gan boi games we played, the silly Kame-Yamapi-Jin stories my daughter and son mouthed off, the silly renditions of Tsuyoshi's fish head gear dancing and horrible out of tune mom imitating him, and the dances they choreographed to V6's music.  Plus the joy of reading to each each other in the dark.

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