1/5/09 Well, today was my first day back to work after the 3 weeks I had off between the holidays and recuperating from my surgery. I was up the first time the alarm went off, and was out the door by 5:45 in an effort to get to the office before the icy rain started. I made it by 6:15, and lasted until about 1:45 or so, which got me about 7 hours in before I had to come home and lie down on the couch. Dinner smelled fabulous. I did a chicken & rice thing in the crock pot with brown rice, 2 cans of cream of chicken soup, and some boneless, skinless chicken breasts. For seasoning I used some wild garlic dip mix. This was one of my learning recipes, I guess. Too much soup, rice was too mushy, not enough seasoning. Yeah, the chicken itself is pretty tasty, but the other stuff is just bleah mushy gross! So I’ll take the chicken out and shred it for chicken salad and toss the other stuff, having learned a lesson. I would have done all of that tonite, before I started getting everything together to throw into the big crock tomorrow for my soup, however, at about 8:15, our power went out. Yeah, it’s 9:30 now, and it’s still out. The whole block on our side of the street, plus the opposite side of the street behind us, except for a couple of houses on the next block in a cul-de-sac on our side of the street is out. Plus on the street behind us, there’s another little cul-de-sac that has like 4 houses with nothing, then 1 with full lights as far as we can see (porch light, etc.), then 2 houses with nothing, then another 1 with full lights, and all the rest are out on that whole street. It’s bizarre. The opposite side of my street is fine. I’m near a corner, and the other side of the cross street is fine. I went for a drive through the neighborhood to see how far the outage ranges, but didn’t find any power trucks doing anything for us. Yeah, it was like 34 degrees when the power went out. We had some rain today, but the power lines in my neighborhood don’t look terribly icy, nor do the trees, but perhaps the trees nearest the main transformer that our grid is on had a problem. Since I use a provider other than TXU because I have a better deal, well, I’m SOL on trying to find out what the status is because TXU won’t talk to me. So my house is currently about 65 degrees and dropping. I sleep better when it’s cold, but not when I’m shivering! Too many covers drive me crazy, but I’ve got my usual winter set of sheets, 1 blanket and my quilt, plus a flannel- backed lap quilt, plus 2 more lap quilts piled on top of me. Hopefully the power will come back on soon and I can actually sleep through the night. Ok, the power came on around 1 a.m. and while I'd slept some up to that point, it wasn't restful, and since my alarm goes off at 5, I got about half the rest I actually need to be able to function. *sigh* AND when I got online this morning to check mail, there's a 'past due' notice in my email about my electric bill, WTF??? So I went to the website and what do you know, they show I have a $0.00 balance. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that is a big fat ZERO balance, because, well, I paid the bill on 12/17/08, and it was applied that day, a full 5 days before it was due. I dunno what they are thinking, other than they are clearly nuts.