Lights Out

I was in the mid­dle of an email early yes­ter­day evening (about 7PM), when *poof* all the power went off. It wasn’t as much of a shock to me as it was to Pam, who was down­stairs in the base­ment stor­age room, but she was able to feel her way out in the total dark — emer­gency light­ing kicked in after a minute or so, just as I was mak­ing her way to get her, should she have become locked in. There was a Blue­berry Buckle in the oven (it’s off now, leav­ing the dessert about half-baked. I had already made a light din­ner of tuna salad and some hot rolls (which were, for­tu­nately, done).
I checked with BC Hydro peri­od­i­cally, and yes, they were work­ing on the out­age, which spanned about 6 streets (5^th thru 11 or so), in roughly a 15 block area from Hem­lock Street to Yew or so (we are at the far­thest east­ern point of the out­age. The other side of Hem­lock to the east is fine — Doh!). They first posted that it was a cable prob­lem and would be fixed by 7 PM. Then the set it to 11 PM. Curi­ously, they said the out­age only affected 1100 res­i­dents, but since we know for a fact that there are 500 in our block of Hem­lock thru Granville, that num­ber is seri­ously out of whack.
We ate din­ner, located some can­dles and flash­lights, took a walk, got back and went to bed. Still no power. I checked again (although my phone was start­ing to run out of power), and BC Hydro had updated to their esti­mate of when power would be back to 2 AM. Then this morn­ing, we got up at about 6:30, and still no change. I went to the nearby Wicked Café to get some cof­fee (since mak­ing our own was out). Appar­ently power was restored at 2AM to every other build­ing but ours. Great. Our build­ing man­ager is out of the coun­try, on vaca­tion, so that might account for the prob­lem, but it doesn’t help, either. Another call to BC Hydro reports that it is ‘A prob­lem with Cus­tomer Equip­ment’ and that the time they esti­mate that power will be restored is 4 PM, but given that the his­tory of this set of missed mile­stones is start­ing to sound a bit like BP in the Gulf of Mex­ico, I’m not hold­ing my breath.
So, it’s about 9:45 and I’m writ­ing from Waves down­town. I plan on head­ing to the library at 10 when it opens, and have an appoint­ment about 3PM, which I will attend unshow­ered, unshaven (no hot water) and in what­ever clothes I could put together. I’m hop­ing that my com­puter will come back with all dri­ves and that not too much food in our fridge and freezer was spoiled, but it’s hard to say how much dam­age has been done.