The trees out back this morning, trying to warm up.

The strangest thing happened this past weekend. On Saturday night we had a brief power outage. It was enough to kick on the generator for about 5 minutes. When the power was restored, we heard the transfer switch go from generator to utility as it is supposed to do. When I went to reset the clock on the stove, the digital display faded out and in with a "sick-sounding" chime. I couldn’t reset it. Very shortly after that, we discovered that certain lights and outlets weren’t working. I have never experienced anything like it. A call to the electrical utility was no help. They assured me that the issue had been fixed. Unfortunately, one of the items not receiving power was our furnace. It was a cold night, and the house was at 57º in the morning.
We didn't get much sleep.

Luckily, I had the cell number for the local electrician who did the initial generator install. He was awesome to come over on Sunday morning and test things. He found that the transfer box was getting full power, but our breaker box was only showing power on ever other breaker. He switched a few breakers around so we would get power on the furnace and other important outlets. Today, another electrician came and was briefly dumbfounded by the issue. It wasn’t until he cut all the power and double-checked the transfer switch that he found the problem. It seems that when the switch moved back to the utility position, an unfortunate stinkbug got caught on one side of connection, essentially blocking one of the 120V legs and the flow of electricity to half of the breakers! Just happy it wasn’t a fried motherboard!



Yesterday’s photo: