I’m hoping that one day soon I get to have a peaceful day where I’m not just trying to minimise payback from activities and external events. Today was not going to be that day.
I didn’t sleep amazingly well last night, so I was hoping to be able to nap a bit this morning. That wasn’t going to happen. The council contractors arrived at ten to eight to start doing more work on the upstairs flat. I’ve got no idea what they’re doing or why it needs so much work when the last tenants were only there for a few months, but it involves drills and banging and lots of stomping on the stairs and slamming of doors.
Soon after 11am I got a phone call from Northern Powergrid on my mobile. I didn’t answer because I can’t manage phone calls. What I did do was go on the website to discover that there was a power cut in my area, including my postcode. At this point I still had power so I just carried on trying to distract myself from the noise, while also trying to get my phone and tablet charged (I had accidentally knocked my phone charger’s plug out so it hadn’t charged overnight, and the charging port on my tablet is pretty dodgy so I have to keep messing with it to get it to charge).
Lunchtime and it was one of my regular care workers, and she had a new one shadowing which I was okay with. She told me that half the street didn’t have any power, which confirmed what I’d seen online. The new care worker seemed nice and liked my care book and my penguins, so hopefully if I get her again it should be okay. Only problem is she has the same first name as one of my other care workers so that’s going to be confusing, especially as I forgot to ask for her surname.
At some point there was noise outside as well as noise from upstairs. It sounded like they were digging up the path outside my window (they were). Just before 3pm, I lost power. Luckily my phone had gotten pretty charged up by then, so I was able to let Johan know immediately. My mattress pump started complaining about the lack of power, but I couldn’t figure out what was causing the noise.
I keep a couple of torches next to my bed partially in case of this (and partially as one is also a laser pointer I like to play with) so I was able to use one to grab my battery powered penguin lights and I also spotted a load of glow sticks. I tried to find my battery pack but it wasn’t in my reach, so I grabbed the glow sticks and made a necklace, two bracelets and a butterfly toy from them. The glow sticks are a couple of years old so not the brightest now, but since my room is really dark without lights they still looked cool.
My afternoon care worker arrived at about half three. She couldn’t heat up my penguins as no power means no microwave, but she was able to sort my other stuff out using a torch. She did quickly look for my battery pack and some spare batteries for my penguin lights as they were pretty dim, but couldn’t find either. She also turned the alarm off my mattress pump which I was very grateful for.
Once she was gone I spent most of my time listening to the Bilbcast while on Twitter and playing with my glow stick toy. The noise from upstairs had stopped (I guess a power cut will do that) but the noise of digging up the path was pretty horrendous. Bilbcast on near max volume plus ear plugs and ear muffs meant I just about managed. The lack of heat (I usually have warm penguins, an electric blanket and a heat pad) meant I was starting to get cold and pain was becoming a problem, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.
Johan got home around quarter to six, and I immediately set him to finding me some warm socks and my battery pack (which was in my medicine drawer for some reason). Just as he was looking for replacement batteries the power came back on. We got confirmation via one of the workers that it was going to stay on so I got my penguins heated and turned my blanket on. It helped.
Since then Johan has gone out for a run, and via Twitter I was able to sort out getting Northern Powergrid to only send me text messages in future. I’m hoping not to have too much payback from this, but I’ve been running off adrenaline all day so we’ll see. I still have a cold and my arm is sore from the flu jab. Hopefully tomorrow will be quieter, though there’s a massive hole in the path that needs to be filled in.