Abandon ship

I’ve officially entered day four without electricity. The kids were due home from their dad’s place last night, so tough decisions needed to be made.

While I was adapting to candlelight, scant mobile phone reception and showering at the gym, I figured that wasn’t going to fly with teenagers.

The latest word from Ausgrid: “Customers are advised to prepare for the power to be out until the end of the week. We hope to get many customers back sooner. However those in Sydney’s north & the Central Coast should plan for these delays. We know it’s frustrating, we are doing everything we can.”

Sigh.

I instructed the eldest to come home after school, double check if there was any power, clean out the smelly rat Taj Mahal  and spend some quality time with the rodents. I also ordered some Domino’s pizza, then arranged for the eldest to be collected by my ex again.

Soon afterwards, DD’s cousin popped in to say goodbye on her way to the airport – she’s reluctantly heading back to Hong Kong, as the coronavirus crisis looks set to continue for many months and she has six puppies at home missing her.

After the youngest finished skipping training at 7.30pm, I loaded her up with pizza and headed to DD’s place for the night.

We drove past Narrabeen Lagoon, where I cheerfully informed the youngest a shark had been spotted earlier in the week! Kinda beats yesterday’s eel story …

When we got to DD’s we headed straight upstairs for hot showers and power points.

Thanks DD!

Who knows what today will bring? People are getting VERY agitated on Ausgrid’s Twitter account, though I’d imagine it’s a bit tricky getting power back on to 140,000 houses.

Tweets included: “Wow almost like instead of retrenching 3000 employees, it would be to Sydney’s benefit to keep paying them and have 3000 extra employees to deal with this. Crazy how basic demand planning works, right?”

And: “You are right, but you need to be slamming @GladysB over this, it was the government that did it.”

And: “My fish are going to die. Because my fish tank has no power.”

Eeeeek.