Today's adventure started with a bang

Quite literally--a big bang that woke both of us up. Getting up to see what it was, we noticed that we had had a power outage at the same time.  We checked out the whole house, and found nothing. So we had breakfast and started the laundry.  After a bit, both of us noticed that the lights kept flickering.  Then David started hearing a noise that he said sounded like fire so he looked outside.  The noise was coming from the power pole behind the garage.  So he called the Hydro emergency line, and after 15 minutes of propaganda,  got to speak to someone live.  They asked some sort of question that sent him outside again, where there were now visible flames and what David called "arching" at the transformer at the top of the pole. Next was a call to 911.  By this time people on the street had noticed it, and they were also calling 911.  So out came the fire department, and of course, by the time they got here the fire had stopped.  The Captain told us they had been chasing this type of problem all over the city for the past two days.  There was nothing they could do without open flame, and we all just had to wait for the guy from Hydro.  By this time houses all over the area were without power, including us. Neighbours were out in the street. ( maybe it was the fire truck at our house and the fire fighters milling around)  The fellow next door was busy trying to convince the fire fighters that there must be someway we could kill all of the squirrels in the city.

The fellow from Hydro finally arrived and told everyone that this was the second call to Marsden Street today.  Earlier a squirrel had died and cut off power to some of the houses further down the street.  This news just got Lloyd, the neighbour, all upset again, and he renewed his call for wholesale war against squirrels.  Lloyd really hates squirrels and is a little bit afraid of them.  With Hydro on site, the fire truck was able to leave.  We were told that it could be 2-3 hours before power would be restored and that here would be a power surge.  So David disconnected everything, and we went out to run errands.

The rest of the day was somewhat anti-climatic.  Lloyd and I were observing that it took something like this for us to meet our neighbours.  Not Lloyd, of course.  We put up with his harangue against squirrels fairly often.