What do I do without electricity?

   About 9:30 on Sunday morning the lights flickered, dimmed, and went out completely.   The AC came to a screeching halt, and the entire house went silent as all of the noise from running fans stopped abruptly.  "You've got to be kidding me," I thought.   Exactly one week to the day since the boil order was lifted on our water supply.  Seems we have been blessed with all sorts of opportunities recently to test our preparedness skills. We began to think about how this would affect us.  I claimed the first shower, just in case the hot water went cold before the the tanks could heat again, and then I remembered we have gas water heaters.  :-) We wondered if church would be cancelled if there was no power in the building, and hubby started dragging out the solar panels we haven't had a chance to set up yet.  {Notice the shade tree directly over them... ha ha.}  

     Truthfully that kind of made me laugh because we didn't even know yet if this would be a long term outage.   And there's wouldn't be enough power coming from those to run a freezer, which was my biggest immediate concern.  Freezers will continue to keep your food frozen for quite a long time if you don't open the doors.   But in a long term outage, most food would begin to thaw within 12-18 hours.  Requiring cooking up of any meats, and other foods.   Canning of vegetables, and tossing out ice cream and popsicles.     We have tons of Goat milk in our freezer that wouldn't be good for anything but Cheese or soap.   And truthfully, I'm not prepared for the amount of work it would take to salvage/process all of this.

     We have had a heat wave lately as well, and it was already over 80 outside at 9am so I knew the house was going to heat up pretty quickly.   The Solar panels might power a few fans, but ultimately, we'd have to start living in the basement to keep cool.   I had noodles boiling on the {gas} stove in preparation for dinner, which was actually a good thing, because I had contemplated using my electric pressure cooker that morning, and decided against it.   But all of this ads heat to the room quite easily.

   I also rather enjoyed the fact that within minutes, people were posting on Facebook about the outage from their smart phones with internet contracts.   The whole neighborhood was out of power and we still have Facebook.   Kind of oxymoronic in a cool sort of way.   And I don't discount the usefulness of Facebook in times of emergency either.   It was how the city kept in contact with us about the water issues as well, and how I found out the boil order was lifted.  Its sort of our latest source for local news and information.   And tidbits spread like wildfire, so its really an effective means of checking on everyone and spreading the updates.

    I know you are used to very informative updates from me, but this one is just intended to make you think.   What would YOU do if you had a long term power outage?   Are you prepared to carry on?   Would you be able to cook, eat, keep warm/cool?   Are there things in your house that could/should be changed replaced to accomodate such a situation?  Ie:  having a gas rather than electric stove, water heater, etc. etc.

     I'll ad more to this topic as time goes on.   We can discuss alternate power options, energy efficiency ideas and more.  In the meantime, I'm super grateful that my power was only off for 2 hours and 3 minutes.  :-)   Have a great week!

     

Update on the Beehive! All Engines are go!

I just started my Bee education with this fabulous book, also approved by my beekeeper, Jed.

This is one of the definitive resources for new beekeepers.  Get your Copy today!

This is just a reference photo I downloaded so you can compare it to what is in MY hive.

MY HIVE UPDATE:

My friendly neighborhood beekeeper, Jed came by today to check on the little buzzers.  I love being there when he takes off the lid so I can see what all they've been up to since the last time we looked.   I was amazed at the sheer quantity of the bees this time.  They have probably tripled of more the number of inhabitants.  This mean the queen has been doing her job, laying lots of eggs, and the workers have been busily gathering everything and building out the hive.

We saw lots of Nectar, Honeycomb, Larva, eggs, and Brood.  Even a bit of Pollen and the precurser to honey.

Here he is pulling out the first frame, and I was just amazed at what we saw.

Yes, this photo is from MY hive!  Yahoo!   These little critters have been busy working and preparing for winter.   You can see all the elements from the diagram above visible in this photo.

Rogue comb - the bees are building somewhat outside the frame.  This has to be removed to keep the frames from sticking together and sticking to the lid which would prevent being able to check on and care for the bees.

Jed also added a second box to the Hive today.   The bees have filled all the frames in the original blue box on the bottom and they are ready to work into the next box.

He also installed this new sugar water holder in place of one of the frames in the new box.   It makes it much easier for the bees to get the fuel they need to build out this first year.