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.