It was 4:40am, and Diane and I were sleeping peacefully. The house was quiet and dark. Suddenly, we were awakened by a bright blue light in our bedroom – I pried my eyes open to see the “halo” on our Amazon Echo glowing brightly and then go dark. I got out of bed – everything seemed OK; the night light in the bathroom was on, as expected.
But there was a light coming from the kitchen, which I didn’t expect. I walked in and discovered the cause – our broiler oven’s panel was illuminated. I took a closer look and saw that it was set to its default setting (“Bagel”, 4 slices, mid-darkness). And the clock on the stove showed “PF” – Power Failure.
I went back to the bedroom and slept until the alarm went off as usual. My phone showed a series of alerts from the security system telling me that we’d lost and regained power twice during the night (we’d slept through the first cycle at 11:30). PG&E had texted about both failures, but only about the first restoration – it turned out that we’d been lucky in having our power return so promptly. People living on the other side of the creek from us didn’t get power back until after 2pm.
It was all due to windstorms – which are also fanning fires throughout the Bay Area. In January. I can’t wait for 2020 to be over!