Buckhorn Road was burning

Well, almost. The reason I haven't posted in the last few days is because I have been without a computer. The reason? On Tuesday morning while I was teaching, I got a very rare phone call on my cell phone. It was my home alarm company informing me that they had received a maintenance signal from our alarm system. There wasn't much I could do about it until I got home. Around 4pm, the fam and I arrived home to find the electricity at our house was completely out in one section of the house, and was doing some strange things in the rest of the house. I would turn on a light, and it would burn at what seemed like 400w, then a few seconds later, it would be barely illuminated like we were having a brownout. Speaking of brownouts, our refrigerator was barely functioning, so I ran an extension cord to another outlet that seemed to be OK. When I plugged in the fridge to the new outlet, it caused the power in the entire house to diminish to almost nothing. There had been such a surge of power in my son's room, that a bulb had burst out of the light fixture on his ceiling fan, and fallen to the floor. The metal part of the bulb was still screwed into the socket. I tested our kitchen chandelier, and turning it on instantly caused two bulbs to burst. To top everything off, the house was permeated with acrid odor of overloaded electrical wire. It was as if our house had been possessed by a poltergeist, and we have come to find out that we were damned lucky our house didn't burn down.

My suspicion was that our 40 year-old circuit panel had finally gone kaput. Nevertheless, I called our local utility company to come take a look. To cut to the chase, it turns out that our next-door neighbor had a tree company in his back yard that morning, and somehow, the workers had managed to either partially cut the powerline running our house, or a felled branch had landed on the powerline and pulled it partially loose from the pole. Either way, the line had lost its ground, and had spent the day surging and diminishing in an effort to find some kind of equilibrium.

Once the utility repairman replaced the damaged line, he told me I might want to go around the house and check if any electrical equipment had been damaged. I began pushing buttons on our electronics to see if anything was ruined. Behold the list of what needs to be replaced:

Computer tower
Home stereo
Home CD player (6 disc changer)
Two DVD players
Mounted microwave oven
Two alarm clocks
$800 of circuitry in our air conditioning system
Cordless weed eater (battery recharger was ruined)
Three ceiling fans
Garage door opener
Dish Network box
Cordless phone
The transformer to our alarm system was blown

Not to mention a visit by an electrician that cost $200 in which he said our breaker panel will probably need to be replaced, and also a day off from work on Friday so I could receive all these technicians who paid a visit.

One of Friday's visitors was a representative from the tree-trimming company who confirmed that it was his workers who caused this mess, and next week, I will be hearing from their insurance company.

One purchase that couldn't wait was a new computer, as we use it for an additional consulting business that my wife and I both do. I saved the receipt.

This experience has already been such a pain, but if I can find any lemonade in this deluge of lemons, at least we will be receiving an upgrade on our computer, stereo, and other older equipment that did not survive the Chanman family electrical massacre of 2009.

Good Day to You, Sir