…big bang, flash outside. Nope, not the mate to the Indonesian meteor: an electric line to the neighbors house just broke and dropped into the city arterial that flanks our house. We lost power briefly, and then a pumper firetruck shows up, blocks traffic while they haul the broken (live) wire out of the street. Hopefully our local power company will roust somebody out to deal with it—and replace the adjacent street light while they’re at it. What the across-the-arterial neighbor is doing about power, one isn’t certain…though the line could have gone to that streetlight that’s been out. At any rate, I’m glad it didn’t drop into our yard, as in, the pond.
The wind is blowing like crazy. I set up the pot-filter (simple bucket with floss and a circulating pump) to get the debris that is blowing into the pond literally faster than I can net it out. You’d know the hawthorne would finally give up its leaves the week after we pulled the main pump. But the real offender is the 40′ tall hemlock that looms above the fence. They don’t have long needles, but they have a lot of needles, and they send them far and wide.
I remember opening the front door one morning, years ago, and discovering that the power drop to the house diagonally in front had dropped during the night. (Santa Anas can be so much fun. Not.)
The other wonderful experience was in west Texas, when the electric cable supplying the well pump shorted out. It would have been spectacular for a few seconds – it melted a couple-three inches of three-wire line – but it was also two or three feet underground. (Apparently either the pump cycling or the temperature cycles caused it to chafe where it went through the casing.) We were glad it was a simple thing to fix, because the well was a couple of hundred feet deep, and replacing the pump would have been a major operation.