Last night at about 8:30pm, the kids and I were watching a show together, and I heard a small boom outside, and the power went out through out the whole house. The first thing I did was to get a flashlight and make sure that all of the doors were locked. Sean was working at the plant, so it was just me and the kids. I looked outside, through the window, to see if the other houses were out as well. No, it was just our house. Everyone else had power.
The next thing to pop into my mind was a certain email that someone had sent me a while ago about killers, kidnappers, and rapists that would cut your power out to lure single women outside of their houses. Needless to say, I was nervous. I called Sean at work, to let him know what happened. He suggested going to my fuse box and checking to see if a wire had just tripped. No such luck. Everything was still pitch black.
There wasn't much he could do from work, so we hung up, and I called a friend to get the number to FPL (Florida Power and Light) to report the outage and hopefully get useful information. They said the earliest they could get someone out to our place was around midnight. I politely thanked them, and asked them what to look for when they came, so as not to let in someone with bad intentions. Luckily they said that they would not need to come into the house, so not to worry about that.
I was still nervous that there could be some mean prowler outside, and of course the kids were nervous as well. So I called 911 and calmly asked if it were possible to send someone over to check and make sure the area was safe. I always say it is better to be safe then sorry. Besides, I didn't have any of my neighbor's phone numbers handy, otherwise I would have asked one of them to peek out their window to see if they could spot what was the matter.
This whole time I was trying to get the kids to bed as calmly as I could, but there was way too much excitement for them to go down too easily, and the slightest sound or movement would have them coming back out to me. Luckily, at about 9-ish, the policemen came knocking at the door. I told them my worries, and they looked all over, and tried to even look and see what would have caused the outage to my house. They saw nothing, to my relief, and before they left, along came the FPL workers to check out the lines. Thank goodness.
It was about 9:30ish when the lights finally came back on. FPL kept calling with updates on the power outage. Apparently I was one of five people who was affected by the blackout, the others I could not see within my house, and seemingly some small animal had caused it all. What a relief. I much rather it be some small animal that had caused it, then some strange person wanting to cause me and my kids any harm.
My sweet husband, during this escapade, was able to get out of work to come home and help me, but since he has to drive such a long distance, by the time he got home everything was already in order. He stayed home long enough to hear the great story, get a bite to eat, then return to work.
The kids also, finally were able to get to sleep soon after it all. I just have to express my gratitude to the fact that the police acted so quickly, the FPL employees came so promptly, that my friend was so willing to help, and my sweet husband was so willing to respond to my little fright, and somewhat emergency. We do live in such a great country to have such wonderful blessings as this.
