Woken up to a power outage. A big one, apparently: everywhere south of Worcester is out. That means I’d have to drive at least two hours to find anywhere with electricity.
And there’s no ETA for a fix yet.
It seems likely that the internet here will fail at some point soon, given that it works on batteries when there’s no mains supply, so I thought I’d get this up while I can and maybe add to it later.
In the meantime, I’m going to fire up the emergency camping stove and make some coffee.
A surprise, yet scheduled, power cut today. For infrastructure maintenance, we’re told. That’s good. Some places don’t get their electricity infrastructure maintained. Like the rest of South Africa, for example.
Ostensibly, we’re off for a whole 14 hours. Without warning, nogal.
Well, apparently, there was a warning, but we weren’t told about it. And that’s one of the fundamental things about warnings. If you don’t get them, then you are very much unwarned.
And so we are quite literally without electricity, without warning.
It’s like getting loadshedding back, which might be good training for next week when everyone thinks we’ll be getting loadshedding back…
An aside for foreign readers: next week is election week here, and it’s widely believed that loadshedding has been done away with for the last 7 weeks in the hope that the voting public will conveniently forget that the current (no pun intended) ruling party can’t even supply the most basic of services. Quite whether this is true or not is up for debate, but it’s an entirely reasonable suggestion. Quite how the electricity grid is being propped up is also a bit of a mystery, but it seems like it’s billions of Rands worth of diesel, some sticky tape, and prayers to several (or more) deities. It’s also completely unsustainable. And furthermore, it’s pointless after the polling stations close on Wednesday evening. Hence the widespread belief that we’ll be back to Stage n very shortly.
But I digress. Often.
The council have also chosen the darkest, most miserable day to do the work. Thick black clouds, a cold Westerly breeze, drizzle. If this was Sheffield, I’d look at those clouds and fully expect snow. That’s unlikely to happen though. Still, not only will this inclement weather slow the workers down, it’s also preventing our little home solar setup from helping out with the power situation. We’re only a month away from the winter solstice, and so even if we could see the sun – which is some 151½ million kilometers away anyway – it would only be up for 10 hours and would only drag itself to 35o above the horizon.
I’m not an expert on solar power, but we need is closer, higher sun, for longer.
If we’d had some warning (which we didn’t – see above), then I could have pumped up the batteries and lived a near normal life. Instead, we’ve been in deficit since we woke up, and despite my best power-saving efforts, I’m helplessly watching what’s left slowly, inexorably slip away.
I might be tempted to rig up some sort of system so that as the batteries give up completely, they give a comedic beep…beep…beeeeeeeeeeep noise like one might hear in rather less comedic circumstances in a hospital ICU.
But then again, I suppose that that would only use more power. Which we don’t have. Because of the power cut.
On the plus side, there has been a delicious lack of angle-grinding and jack-hammery from the nearby building site. This is not going to assist with my waning electricity issues, but it has made it a whole lot quieter while the power runs out.
And it’s clearly the little wins that I’m going to have to focus on today.
I’m powerless to do anything else.
It’s not gone well.
We were forced to abandon our weekend away half way through by a combination of horrible weather and no electricity.
Either one of these would be bearable on its own, but together, and with the option of Cape Town not too far away, it was sadly a no-brainer.
Games by firelight
We were all kept awake by the beagle who was (understandably, to be fair) kept awake by the storm which lashed Agulhas overnight. Luckily, the journey back to the Mother City was easy and traffic-free – tempers may have become frayed otherwise. We’re all knackered.
The electricity supply had still not been restored when we left, meaning 24 hours without power (and counting). All the stuff in the freezer was ruined and had to be thrown out.
But these things happen and – as I’ve said before – it’s the way you react to them that makes the difference. That explains why I’m not hugely impressed with the Cape Agulhas Municipality who also kept us in the dark (haha) over their efforts to sort things out.