(This post, with just a bit more embellishment, is now available as a podcast.)

Thursday night an ice storm hit the Northeast. Power flicked off and on a bit, but didn’t go off, and we went to bed.

Friday morning, about 5:30, we were awakened by a squeal from the cellar. All the power was off, and I recognized it as the alarm on the sump pump in the cellar, which is triggered by rising water levels. I grabbed a flashlight, went down cellar, waded through ankle deep water and turned off the battery powered alarm.

I came back up and called NYSIG, our power company, on my cell phone. “Press 1 to report a life threatening emergency, press 2 for all other questions.” I just wanted to know when the power was coming back on, so I pressed 2. “Please enter your ten digit account number.” I wasn’t about to dig through my bills with a flashlight, so I redialed and pressed 1.

A man answered and said that 100,000 people were without power, (we later learned it was about 240,000), lines were down all over the place and they had no estimate when the power would be back on. We waited an hour or so until my daughters got up, made a few phone calls, and determined that the places they worked were also powerless. Rather than stay in an increasingly colder house we piled into the car and headed north, to Saratoga, where they still had power. We went out for lunch, hung around the nice warm mall, and went to a movie.

We got out of the movies around six, and called the house. If the power was back on Vonnage would kick over to voice mail, if not it would forward the call to my cell phone. My cell phone rang.

We called NYSIG again, and the same guy answered the phone. There was still no estimate of when the power would be restored.

So we went out to supper and spent more than we should have, took as much time as we could at the restaurant, then headed home.

The house was down to 50 degrees. We bundled up and went to bed.

There was still no power when we woke up. The inside temperature was now 40. I called NYSIG, and was told they expected the power would be restored by Wednesday. Wednesday!

I needed coffee. I always make coffee with a French press, grinding the beans just before I brew it, but the grinder didn’t work without power and all I had was whole beans. I stepped on the back porch and put a pot of water on the grill, then went back inside, put a handful of beans in a plastic bag, and pulverized them with a meat hammer. Hot coffee tastes especially good in a freezing cold house.

I’d wanted to get a generator for a while, and now I needed one. Some of the water had drained out of the cellar on its own, but without power there was a risk that it could fill up at any time, ruining the heater and the gas water heater I’d had installed just a few months before. With nightly temperatures in the teens, burst water pipes were almost guaranteed. And a freezer full of food would be ruined. I needed a generator now.

I called every hardware store in the area. Nobody had any. I finally found one at a BJs in Utica, about 110 miles away. I told them to save me one.

I wasn’t looking forward to driving back down the Thruway with a generator half sticking out of my trunk, held in by bungee cords, but Stephen, a neighbor who my kids still babysit for said he wanted one too, and offered to drive us both there in his pickup truck if my kids would watch his kids. He has a fireplace, so it was an easy sell. I had, by then, contacted an electrician who said he could hook it up to the house wiring when we got back, and told us that we also needed to get a gen tran pack to hook it up to our existing breaker box.

We left around noon. The trip to Utica was uneventful, and we got two generators at BJs for six hundred bucks each. While we were waiting at the service desk to ring them up the woman in front of us was having trouble renewing her membership. I told Stephen how I had made coffee that morning, and she finished her transaction just as I said “That worked out pretty well.” The woman, thinking I was talking about her, turned around and gave me a funny look. “I wasn’t talking about you,” I explained, “I was just telling him how I made coffee with a hammer.” She gave me a funnier look.

BJs didn’t have gen tran packs or even know what they were, so we went to a nearby Lowes. They were sold out. Next stop, Home Depot. There I met someone who didn’t have any either, but told me he had been a master electrician for thirty years and wanted to have a conversation about how NYSIG were a bunch of assholes and shitheads and they sucked. Language doesn’t offend me, but I was surprised to hear that from a clerk on a sales floor. I was also awfully impressed that a master electrician was working for probably ten bucks an hour at a Home Depot.

Stephen made some calls from the truck and we located the Gen-Tran packs at a Home Depot in Amsterdam, which was on the way home and about 45 minutes from our neighborhood.

We hit the Thruway and headed home. About a half hour later the truck started bucking. Hard. (I’d like to tell you the truck was a Bronco, because that would be funnier, but it wasn’t.) We drove on the shoulder at 25 MPH for about a mile and it smoothed out again. Ten minutes later it started again. We drove on the shoulder, slowly, for five miles before we came to a rest stop. We were hoping it was just a case of bad gas or clogged fuel injectors. A full tank of gas, along with dry gas and some STP additive, and we hit the road again. It ran smoothly. For about a mile. Then the bucking started again. About ten minutes later it smoothed out, and stayed fairly smooth for the rest of the trip. We breathed a sigh of relief.

We pulled into the Amsterdam Home Depot. Several people were walking out pushing flatbed hand trucks…with generators on them. They had received a shipment while we were in transit.

We got our Gen-Tran packs ($300 each), some five gallon gas cans, and headed home. About twenty minutes from home we pulled into a gas station and filled the cans. We were delighted. We had been on the road for about six hours, but we had our generators, the electronics, gasoline and an electrician waiting to install everything.

As we pulled out of the gas station both our cell phones rang. Our kids were calling us to let us know the power just came back on.