Huff and Puff

We have had some windy days recently that hit too close to home last week. I came home from work on Friday to find that a mini-twister had raced down my street and took out half of my neighbor's tree. As you can see the tree cracked at its base vertically.



Further examination shows dry rot or dead rot in the core of the trunk.


The tree came down into the street and snapped my cable TV line. It also stretched the phone and power lines all the way down to the pavement, ripping them from the house and scaring the hell out of Debby and the girls when they landed on our garden window on the side of the house.



DWP was out within two hours and shut off the power to our house so that they could throw the line over the fallen tree and then reattach it to the house. Total outage time was less than 30 minutes. Saturday, an emergency crew from the city came and cut up the fallen tree and cleared it out of the street, which was two-thirds blocked. They moved it all off to the side so that a reqular crew can come and clean it up at some point. An hour after that an AT&T technician arrived and re-hung and stretched the phone lines that the tree guys had freed up by sectioning up the tree. Total phone outage time was zero. And then came the wait for the Time Warner Cable technician.....

....the long, horrific wait. The wait that required me to find rabbit ears so that I could watch football. The wait that forced me to watch static covered NFL playoffs. The two day wait that endured for an additional tw0-and-a-half hours while the cable tech re-ran coxial from the power pole, down the line, across the street and to my house. Total cable TV outage time 51 hours. The horror....the horror...