Category Archives: Castle Willett

It’s never a good thing when “something” wakes you up at 02:27 and you can’t quite put your finger on it laying there in the dark.

Then you realize that you’re up to your eyeballs in “dark” – what happened to the light from the clock, the cable box, the night light, the light from the kitchen night lights… Well, the winds are HOWLING again, so I guess that’s not too surprising? It’s tough to make sense of things when it’s 02:28.

Okay, the power’s out. But why is there still light from the street lights? Maybe they’re on a different circuit of some sort?

By the light of the ever-present cellphone, I got into some sweats and went exploring, cautious of the possibility that there might be a loose wire down out there. And the first immediate odd thing is that there are houses up and down the street with lights.

Is it us? Check the breaker box, toggle the master circuit breaker, doesn’t make any difference.

A closer examination shows that the houses on either side of us are dark, and the two houses directly across the street. But everyone else is fine.

Watson, by the power of logical deduction, I have determined that something has gone wonky on the power pole across the street. Wouldn’t it feed those five houses and not any of the others?

Having some idea of what’s going on (or at least an educated guess) I get on my phone to put in an outage report with DWP. Then I fall asleep out on the couch. Fitfully.

My only real concern is the two refrigerator/freezer units. But as long as we keep the doors closed, they should be good for a bunch of hours.

At about 05:00 I hear a truck outside and go hustling out. But it’s not DWP, it’s Spectrum. Their driver says that he was sent out because there’s a cluster of several houses here that have gone offline. Yep, that would be us, but I think we need DWP. He’ll have Spectrum follow up with DWP.

I check my phone again and find that DWP has left several voice mails, but been blocked because, A) It’s the middle of the freaking night, and B) they’re calling from a number that’s not in my phone books, so my phone is treating them as spammers. Okay, yes, that’s what I’ve programmed and it’s a good little robot phone, but timing is everything. I call DWP back and they want to know if I still need help. Yes, thank you, that would be why I put in an outage report. (How come the cable company knows about this and they don’t?!)

About 08:45 the DWP rolls up and I go out to let them know what I know. Uh, duh, dude, and the guy points at the power pole. (Okay, trying to be helpful, but I was probably being a stereotype from some ad.)

Well, THERE‘s your problem! That cable on the left isn’t supposed to be hanging loose like that.

We sit around for a while waiting for a truck with a bucket lift on it, then it’s time to be rescued from the Dark Ages.

On the side of the transformer, up near the top, there’s a bump or wart. That’s where that wire should connect. So they grab that dangling wire (carefully), unscrew the clamps on that bump/wart and clean out the debris, strip an inch or two of insulation off of the end of the dangling wire, and insert it into the side of the bump/wart thing. There was a very satisfying ZZAAAAAAAPPP!! and flash. They clamped the bump/wart thing back down, and we were again on speaking terms with with the electrons.

Then I went to get breakfast and got stuck behind the long-winded, annoying dude from Hell.

Then I got home and found out that they had messed up my breakfast order.

And DAMN IT, I took too long to type this out, it’s after midnight! As of yesterday I had another streak of 245 days in a row posting on the site, and while this will count in my head, it breaks the streak so far as WordPress is concerned.

SHAZZBATT!!!

The directory said “2004/Dirty Paul.” I knew exactly what photos they were, even 17+ years later.

The old house wasn’t on a slab, there was a crawlspace under the house. Not much of one, maybe 18 to 24 inches, sometimes less, sometimes a little more. Fortunately, there were not a lot of spider webs or other critter-spoor down there. But it was dusty as hell.

I would end up down there once every couple of years for some plumbing or other problem and it was a pain. Getting in was only accessible by a teeny, tiny portal, maybe 18 by 24 inches, and that was at the bottom of a knee-high wall surrounding the portal and the screen door covering it. Getting in was a real contortionist trick, as was getting out. Immediately inside were some of the larger drain pipes from the two big bathrooms, so it was a really tight squeeze.

Moving around in there was also a royal pain, crawling on my belly, not even able to get up on my knees to crawl. As you can see, I was not in the finest of physical shape at the time (not that I’m any freakin’ Adonis now, but at least now I’m about 40 pounds lighter) so by the time I had been under there a few hours I was sore, sore, sore.

This particular day I believe that I was running coax cable for internet and cable TV. I had drilled holes in the floor in all five of the bedrooms, as well as the kitchen and living room. Then I dragged a drill underneath the house, drilled out a hole though the foundation into the family room/den at the end of the house (where the internet & cable hookup was), and started dragging cables. LOTS of trips from, each room to the portal to the family room. Hours and hours under there.

I got done what I wanted to and we did like having internet and cable in each room on a nice, high-speed, secure, wired connection. This was before wi-fi was real fast or reliable, and in a 3,300 square foot, one-story, ranch-style house, wi-fi always pretty much sucked over about half the house once you got away from that end. (That, of course, got fixed and upgraded a few years later, but at the time it was a big deal.)

Nevertheless, when I finally crawled out, exhausted, one of my kids was there with the camera. (None of those apples fell very far from that tree!)

At least my hair was still dark!