Autumn Madness

Sorry I wasn't here yesterday to show you pictures of our own garden and it's autumn glories (they accompany this post instead!) but a vital element was missing that I needed to do so i.e. electricity.

I was sewing along merrily yesterday afternoon when all of a sudden there was a very loud bang outside and at the same moment everything stopped, the sewing machine, my CD player and the light! So off to the phone, which of course also had stopped. Fortunately we are prepared for power cuts and we have an old phone that doesn't require power to work so phone Scottish Power who promised an engineer. Then all of a sudden our house alarm went off and as the keyboard had lost power there was no way to switch it off. The handbook (that amazingly I found where it was meant to be) told us it would not go off for longer than 15 minutes but in fact it took more than half an hour to stop. While it was going an engineer arrived but it was the one who had come to repair our washing machine. Needless to say he could do nothing without electricity!

So here we were, alarm going, dogs barking, John trying to start our generator, neighbours stopping by the gate to see whether we were being burgled, when the Parcelforce delivery man arrived to return a quilt which had been to Great Northern Quilt Show in Harrogate. It turned out there was a rozette enclosed as I had won the 2nd price in the Large Wallhangings section. Excited screams were added to the chaos!

Finally a whole fleet of electricity engineers in a variety of vehicles also turned up and decided that there had been a bird strike on the fuse arm (no idea but apparently rather vital for the electricity supply), which was also the cause of that bang. It took only minutes to put right but they advised us to leave using any sensitive equipment overnight just in case there was still a problem with the fuse so no sewing machine and no computer. I don't know if they are sensitive pieces of equipment, but I'm certainly very sensitive to either of them failing! Normality or rather what goes for that here in Macbiehill seems to be restored and I'm looking forward to a peaceful day sewing as well as to another visit from the washing machine engineer. Fingers crossed!