Well that didn't take long. A power company truck rolled onto the street just about the time I posted the article. I walked outside to kill the main breakers to protect my stuff from the restore surge and then chatted with the power company tech a bit.

I watched the guy work and have to say that he's a professional. The fuse switch had opened up at the transformer pole. Instead of just closing it and moving on he took t he time to examine it and found that the switch was old and not making a proper locking contact any more.

He called for another guy to bring him a new one. When the new guy arrived with the switch they went to work changing it out. I chatted with the new guy a bit and commented on the really cool sun visor thingy he had attached to his hardhat and inquired as to where I can buy one for my hardhat.

He told me that the power company supplies them and pulled his off and gave it to me. I tried to decline saying that I knew he still had to finish out his shift in the sun but he insisted saying that he would swing by the office and get another one.

I thanked him and shook his hand and then watched as they finished up. I now have power once again and no worries about spoiled grub.

My hat's off to the power company guys.

Lucky man having them be so quick and so professional.  The folks up this way are probably just fine on the professional part, but my house always seems to be at the end of the line for restorations   I know it's all act of god type stuff (normally) with some old equipment mixed in along the way, but I really don't like losing power for any lenght of time.  Spoiled food don't make me happy, and I really don't like not having air conditioning or heat running to keep me at my desired temperature

Like I said, it's a hit or miss proposition here. We got lucky today. Well, ok, we would have been luckier to have not lost power at all, but you get my drift.

I've never encountered as many power outages as we have out here. Quite a few times, we hear what sounds like a shotgun blast or a car wreck outside our home. Something (I dont think its a trasnsformer...fuse maybe?) ends up blowing up and they have to come out to fix it. The wife of one of the guys who came to our house one time was a coworker at school. She said that lots of the power grid in this town is old and needs to be replaced and the company keeps replacing fuses and transformers and tries to get them covered under a factory warranty....but the factory isn't buying it anymore as it hapens so much. I don't know why they just don't spend some money and upgrade the system. But from what it sounds like...they might not want to deal with it if the boom will only last a few years.

A few months back we had one of those green boxes crap out. They came over, putzed around inside it and ended up bringing another truck with another box on the trailer and they swapped it out with the boom crane. Not too sure the purpose of it...figured it was some kind of electrical connection as they had to use a long pole to do the connecting. Then they went to the telephone pole by our house in the corner and in about a minute...got power back on. Id say we have had about maybe 20 outages since we have been out here.

The big green box contains a power transformer.