Are You (Enter your favorite Expletive Here) Kidding Me?

I was awakened early Friday morning around 7am by what I thought was someone knocking on my door. The house was quiet and dark, so I just ignored it. When Beki's phone started to ring, I started to think that something was up. When I made it to the front door and looked outside, this is what greeted me:

Exactly the sort of thing that you don't want to see out of your front door.

As you can see, we were fortunate enough that it missed the house. "But wait," you ask yourself, "what is it leaning on that is holding it up in the air like that?

Why the power lines of course!!

I know that I mentioned in a previous post that I would rant about the great power outage of '10 at the bottom of a post, like I always do, but now it gets its own post. The problems all started on Sunday the 25th. Owen's birthday party had been the day before, and had been a great success. The sun was shinning as we drove to church, in fact Beki drove around the parking lot to find some shade to park the car under.

In the 3 hour of church, while I was teaching my awesome Elder's Quorum lesson, you could hear something brewing outside, the power started to flicker, and then went out. ("REPENT FOR THE DAY IS AT HAND," I believe is what I said when this happened.) The power was out for about 42 seconds, and then we finished church without incident.

It was on the ride home that we started to realize that something big had moved through. The closer we got to home, the more traffic lights were out, and limbs were down. Now, we have a tree out in front of our house that is growing at a 45 degree angle. How it had not fallen down is beyond me. Not only is the tree a danger of falling, but it has grown into the power lines that go out to all the houses. As we turned onto our street I was sure that it had fallen and would be blocking our house. As you know if you have read the post about the swingset, we had a different limb fall and cause general havoc in our backyard, but the Leaning Tree of Trouble remained.

In case you are too lazy to read the other post, or don't remember the carnage, here you go!

The next day, as we were assessing the damage, one of the little neighbor girls brought it to our attention that one of our neighbor's trees had dropped a very large branch, but that it had become lodged on another branch high up in the tree. It was very obvious that when this limb finally fell it could easily kill someone who was in the wrong place, and it was going to land on our power lines.

We called the power company, and our neighbor called the power company, but we were way down the list because PEPCO was busy trying to figure out how to be a public utility company. I want you to think about the longest power outage you have ever had. I remember in High School the power went out in something like 6 states at one time, but it was back on within 24 hours.

We got out our candles and the first night was kind of fun. The next morning Beki went to work, where she was able to check online and see the mess that we were in. Over 500,000 people were without power, and PEPCO had no estimated time for when things would be fixed. The result was citywide panic. You couldn't go buy ice, because the stores had no power (Beki brought home some ice packs from the lab in a futile effort to save our food) and because no one here has food storage, people were freaking out.

As I said, Sunday wasn't too bad, Monday was ok, Tuesday was survivable, but by Wednesday we had officially entered the "What in the Hell is PEPCO doing" stage. Power had been out for nearly 4 days, and there was still no sign of them fixing the problem. We had to give our food away, it was 85 degrees in our house, and we had had enough. Luckily for us, our friends were at their beach house in Delaware, so we went and hung out with them.

In the end PEPCO managed to get the power on early in the morning on Saturday, and life seemed to be back to normal - except for the fact that we had no food in our fridge or freezer, and a broken swingset to clean up. This brings us back to the Leaning Tree of Trouble, and its new friend, The Hanging Branch of Sudden, Instant, and Immediate Death! (Movie Reference...5pts if you know where it is from!) While we were in Delaware PEPCO had sent a truck around, but for some reason, nothing had been done about the tree limb waiting to fall on my head. There had been another storm that had knocked out power to the other half of the county, so we tried to justify PEPCO's lack of action as due to the fact that since we had power, they were trying to get power back to those who didn't.

Fast forward to Thursday Morning, around 7am, when I was awakened by a huge thunderstorm. As soon as I heard it, I knew that we were going to lose power. The saying you can go by is "Is it raining in D.C? If yes, then the Renberg's don't have power." Sure enough the power went out,and while we sat around to wait, our Neighbor called PEPCO and informed them again about the tree. We were only without power for 5 hours this time, and that afternoon the Missionaries came over to help me clean up the boy's swingset. While we were out working, a PEPCO truck came rumbling down our cul-de-sac. My excitement turned to horror as I watched them pull up, get out, look at the Leaning Tree of Trouble, decided that since the power was still on, the tree must be ok, get back in their truck, and drive away! I didn't even have a chance to run out front and yell, "No you stupid bastards, not that tree! Look at the one that is going to fall and kill everyone!!!

This is when I realized how everything works out here. Until it breaks completely, they don't bother fixing it. This is why PEPCO has allowed trees to overgrow all of their power lines, the Water Company waits for lines to burst before fixing them, the government waits for the housing market to crash completely before fixing Fannie May and Freddy Mac, (WAIT, WHAT?? THEY HAVEN'T DONE ANYTHING TO FIX THEM? BUT THEY ARE THE WHOLE REASON WE ARE IN THIS MESS....WHAT THE HELL WAS IN THAT FINANCIAL REFORM BILL? WTF???)

Well guess what PEPCO, it fell THE DAY AFTER YOU CAME AND IGNORED IT! I called PEPCO 28 hours ago, but I don't know if they will come, because we do still have power...and if it isn't broke, don't fix it!!!

In the end I am starting to feel like Saruman the Wise from the Lord of the Rings. If you don't remember, he was the guy who turned his house from this tree filled haven:

Into this:

I think I get where he was coming from. It wasn't that he needed the trees to fuel his creation of a giant Uruk-hai army...he was just sick of them falling on his tower! I think I need to do a landscaping makeover...I wonder if the army comes with it...