Folks:

We have a toasty 60 degrees F. at 9:20 this morning with promises of a continued warming trend into the high 70s if not low 80s today. Although my weather may be boring I bet our Danish pal would go on a 3-day bike ride if he had the same forecast.

I can often hear cows mooing in the distance on mornings when I have my bedroom windows open. They have been open all night so I've heard that earlier in the morning but now the course, clanking, banging sounds of men at work have replaced the pleasant pastoral ones. Utility crews are hard at work changing out a power transformer this morning. I'm probably happier than you may be that this computer battery is fully charged. I have no Internet now so I cannot post but I will be able to do that shortly. brace yourself.

All the utility lines are underground here so the faulty transformer isn't up a pole as those were in my rather lame story about the "Sparkle of Christmas". I should think that will make the change out quicker and also easier. The power is off at the moment and may be off for a couple of hours possibly dependent upon whether anyone makes a terrible mistake and grabs a live wire or something. I hope they do not.

This time someone actually came out door to door and warned us the power would be shut down. They told us the day and time and the likely length of time the power would be off. I like that. They should do that every time there is going to be a planned outage. In my experience in the past they did not and my desktop computer crashed. Now once is not a biggie but I've known the power to go off, come back on then off again and so on several times causing great distress inside the black box with a struggling hard drive. That ain't good.

It would be nice to know every time the power will go down for ANY reason too. Every time a suicidal squirrel wishes to fry his nuts and jumps onto one of those very big transformers in a sub station and becomes just another crispy critter I'd love a "heads up" well in advance. When a bough heavy with ice gives way and brings down power lines elsewhere that then causes an overload that creates a domino effect knocking out our power as well I'd want advance notice.

Often those who watch with great interest the TV prognosticators do get advance notice of impending bad weather and can prepare for the possibility of power outages... I want to know for certain. I want to know precisely when. I can of course want all I care to but that isn't happening. It is high time I went out and purchased one of those industrial strength computer battery systems with some sort of solenoid thingy that switches over to DC when the AC power stops keeping the wires warm.

I dunno. Has your layout/format changed or did they just do it to mine? I've lost some stuff. No emojis, no text format choices..... Did I miss another memo?

Ahh, the power is back on already. Great!