Sunday, February 10, 2013

Sunday Night, No Juice...

I am here at the school, doing a load of laundry for my wife. Lesson plans are done, and I am ready for tomorrow. The weekend was uneventful. I hauled several totes full of frozen food over here to put it into the school freezer. I buried another in the snow, and it has obligingly dropped off to zero since.
We were eating dinner at the school (functioning oven), and we got an invite from friends of ours to visit. Off we went, and socializing went on there and back at the house until 1:45 am Sunday.

We are invited again this evening, and one of the other teachers is coming over with us. It will be a nice way to close out the weekend, and start my last week with my wife before she and the baby to be depart for Anchorage and the safety of sophisticated medical facilities.

Time to check the dryer, and go visiting.

Friday, February 8, 2013

Dim, But With Heat...

Back to our narrative, after a lapse of a few days. We are on into February, and the saga of our pregnancy continues. My wife is at 35 weeks now, and our little one will be arriving in the next little while. The preparations are as complete as possible.

We are in the school at 10:27 on a Friday night because the power has gone out again. It went down a day ago, and the prospects for restoration are murky in the near term future. This time, however, we have a generator supplying the two teacher housing buildings with enough power to run the heating systems in each of them. The tricky part is that we only have a single generator, for reasons that I do not understand. Our maintenance man is switching the connection from building to building every three hours. So we crank the heat up, and it cools off. So far, so good. However, it is warm-ish right now, in the low 20s.  Temperatures for the first part of next week are forecast in the single digits. Things might get trickier then.

Of course, we have to consider ourselves luckier than our principal's wife. The building in which she lives has no provision for generator backup, apparently. The temperature in there overnight was apparently in the upper 40's. She and her son are spending the night in the school.

None of us can run our refrigerators under the circumstances, although the frozen stuff was OK when we checked it this afternoon. We may have to stash food in totes and place them outside if this continues. We do have a convenient deep freeze just outside.

There is talk of a part that has been ordered and is hoped to arrive tomorrow. That remains to be seen. We brought a crock pot over here and put chicken soup in it. More meals will likely be consumed here in the next day or so. Waiting expectantly...for both baby and electricity...