Okay, we’re back on-line now. This has been a long and rather hell-ish day. We’re not hurt; we’ve just had our internet and computer dependent worlds knocked about.

Last night, at abut 3:00 am, Harriet was awaken by a loud “pop.” She got up to see if something had fallen downstairs, and when she turned on a light, it burned out with a loud “pop” of its own. She tried one other light, and it popped also. That woke me up, and we realized that something was wrong with the power. I have a voltmeter, and we were seeing 238 V on the outlets (they should be 110 to 120 V). So, I cut all the circuit breakers.

I called Edison, and they had a guy here about 4:30 am. Apparently, you can have a neutral line break in a way that the two phases in the power line can add across the outlets, turning your lines to 2x normal. After some tests, he suspected a tree had broken the line outside the house. A tree crew (contracted by Edison) arrived about 8:30 am and cut some branches away from a power pole, enough to allow access. The Edison crew arrived about 10:30 and began rewiring the section that had been damaged, and by about 12:30 pm we had the power restored.

Then began the inventory of things that have blown out. Oddly, the major appliances and the video electronics are all OK. It’s Harriet’s computer, my computer, the phone recording machine, and a lot of the smaller electronics that are burned out.

We’re in the process of trying to recover. Harriet’s business is completely tied up in that computer. So far, we’ve been able to move the hard drive into another, older machine she has for backup, and now she’s trying to get enough of it functioning so she can work. Steve and Krista have been real champions with helping her get a system working. We owe them, BIG.

I have an older machine that I’ve got running enough to access the internet, hence this update. I can get to my email through the browser, I’m just not able to access the stuff on my main computer. I ordered a new power supply on-line (yay!), so we’re making progress. We’ll see how far along we are before we leave on our trip NEXT MONDAY! Ouch.

The good news is that this didn’t happen while we were gone, and since it appears to have happened out of the residence (and maybe off of our property), Edison has some liability. We’ll be filing claims before we depart.