Monday Monday

What was it the Carpenter's sang?  Rainy Days and Mondays Always Get Me Down  Long night followed by a wake up surprise. My morning alarm clock gave me my 8 am kiss but it was still dark out.  Darker than it had been at 1:45 am and 4:15 am when I had gotten up.  He started pulling curtains open but it was still dark.  Time to get up and take a look.  With that the sky opened up and a down pour ensued.  That show over with, I proceeded into the family room to see how that side of the house looked and lo and behold the ice maker wasn't on.....That's because we didn't have any electricity.  Oh well, been there, done that and about to get a generator cause the newness wore off a long time ago.  But for today, grin and bear it.  Coffee was already made and juice poured so that was a plus.  We had six very old and stale donut holes which became breakfast on the front porch.  The paper was a bit awkward from a stiff breeze and high humidity but we both got it read and the Trib puzzles done for the day.  ComEd has a program where it's all done with automation so reporting the outage was pretty easy but then wait till they called back with an estimate on time to restore.  Of course the encouraging remarks from friends telling us that they heard it was going to take days to get service restored.
Off to lunch since we weren't touching any of the refrigerators or the deep freeze.  Want to keep everything cold or frozen as long as possible in case those news reports were accurate.  Curtains were drawn to keep out the sun and candles were placed around the house in anticipation of an all nighter without electric.  According to Ron, a trip to the grocery store would keep us occupied.  So, off to Food 4 Less in Crest Hill for four items, two of which we couldn't get because they needed to be refrigerated but that's OK, Food 4 Less was closed because they didn't have electricity either.  Traffic lights were out for some of the adventure to the store so we came home a different way.  Saw trees down across side streets with saw horses blocking the road and no one working on them.  Let me tell you, that gave us a reason to believe it would be days before we got power back.  The house was holding the cool air pretty good so we sat outside for awhile so we would appreciate the cooler weather when we went in.
Neighbor across the street came home and started her generator, what a noise, and then came over and asked if we would like to borrow it for an hour or so to plug in our big frig and deep freeze.  We kindly refused since we felt they were doing just fine so far.  With that Ron stuck his hand inside the front door to turn on the porch lights so we'd know if we did get power and the lights came on.  8 hours with no power wasn't our idea of spending a rainy Monday but we survived.  Our hearts did skip a beat when they flickered and went out for a few minutes when we were eating those meatloaf sandwiches we'd been planning on for lunch for supper but it's back on now and we're happy campers.
When my parents bought this place in 1962 they lost their electricity at the first drop of rain and it continued that pattern for quite a few years but then it stopped.  Guess it's started up again.  Oh yes, the kicker is it's usually just our street, the people in back of us on the next street usually have power and the same with the people in back of the people across the street have power when we don't.