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This Journal is mostly about things that happened a month ago... because between my Carpal tunnel problems and back issues I couldn\'t do much uploading or typing. I am doing better than I was, so now I\'m trying to play catch up. 
October 21, 2018 Sunday Evening
On September 21st, 2018, high winds blasted through the metro Detroit area. It happened to be my husbands birthday. My plans for celebrating it with him got derailed by two power outages; one on Friday and one controlled one on Saturday. I guess I had better explain that.
The first power outage occurred on Friday the 21st at 4pm. I had just gotten ready to watch some television. Just when I found the right station, the power went off.
I went outside and looked for neighbors to talk to, trying to determine how wide spread the outage was. I was amazed when I saw electrical power men walking down our street right towards me. How had they learned about the outage so quickly?
It turned out that a high wire had snapped and was swinging loose between my back yard and my neighbors! My neighbor had noticed and reported it; they had come right away since downed lines are dangerous & get top priority. That wire wasn\'t responsible for the power outage though. The outage was caused by a tree falling on a transformer 9 blocks away. Our whole neighborhood was affected by it.
The men told me all of the neighbors on our block were being instructed to stay out of their back yards, in case the wire was live. They said that the tree on the transformer would be taken care of first. They\'d come back the next day (Saturday) to take care of the loose swinging wire. I couldn\'t complain; we got our power back on only 4 hours later.
The next day, they came back. There were 10 to 15 men in our backyard... because our yard has the utility pole in it! After alerting our whole block, they turned off our power so they could work safely.
They started by giving our tree by the utility pole a major "haircut." All sorts of branches came down and were dragged out to the front yard. (The tree doesn\'t look so good anymore.) Then a couple of electrical men shimmied up the pole.
In the meantime, my husband and I watched everything that was going on from our kitchen since it has the best window. I guess it was our entertainment for the afternoon, since we had no phones, internet, or TV. I was very busy with my camera, taking photos of all the goings on. I only took photos when they weren\'t looking... but I still managed to get a bunch of them. I didn\'t realize until later that I took over 12 dozen! lol That made it very hard for me to pick the two that I uploaded today. (I hope to upload more of them sometime.) Really, it was quite interesting. I wonder what those 2 men would think if they knew they were on Desktop Nexus?
They took about 2 hours to finish & turn on our power back on. One thing was a major surprise to us; the men told us that our utility pole is in great shape. We have our doubts about that. I don\'t know if you can tell from the wallpapers I just uploaded, but our pole has a distinct bow in it! (Two strong guy wires support it.) And if you look at the wallpaper directly below, you can see where the crossbar is "chewed off" on one side.
On one hand, we were glad to hear that we didn\'t need a new pole, it would be a major undertaking; especially since our pole is more or less embedded in our fence. On the other hand we can\'t help wondering what a "bad" utility pole must look like if they say ours is in great shape!
Elaine
PS. You can tell that the power outages happened a month ago, because all of the leaves on the trees were still green! The other walls I uploaded with these are "hot off the press" from the past couple of weeks. It feels so great to be uploading and active on DN again! 
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