Generators are best bought in summer!

February 2011

I bought a generator yesterday. The worst time to buy one, of course. It was an impulse buy. I had to “save the food” .... and keep from going stir crazy. 

Sometimes I just don't think these things through. In the middle of the storm, I drive to town knowing I was crazy (turns out many other fools were out there, too). Town was shut down, no power, though a couple stores were open.  I hung out at the hardware store for awhile. We all watched the snow fall, the old guys talking about a time when Grass Valley had 10ft banks every winter. Now we only get one or two small storms, snows gone in a day. It was nice to be around people, and I don't often say that. One gal at the store took me to their break room for coffee and we drank hot coffee and chatted. They had a big generator, and lots of coffee. They were sold out of household generators! 

So, once warmed up and with my fill of social time I cross the street to the Honda store. The Honda store! Could I have gone to a more expensive spot?  Then I buy an item I can barely lift (70 lbs) much less carry the 50 ft to where it would go. Turns out that didn't matter anyway because I couldn't get my 4 wheel drive up my steep driveway. But I was determined so I walk the 1,000 ft, 20% grade, driveway up to the house, get the snow shovel, walk down, do my best to shovel me out. A few tears of frustration, with lots of pep talks - all the while hoping I don't have a heart attack. 

A path was cleared, I get in and move. Yea! Careful now, whoa, no wait. OK. So I move the car about 10 ft and its stuck again. Slid sideways right back in to the ditch. Out with the shovel, more digging. I try to move it again. Oh, no. Now I’m afraid the car is going to fall over. (Yes, I heard, cars don’t just fall over.) That's enough of that. So I walk back up the drive thinking I'm going to use a dolly and pull the thing up the hill. I just spent a fortune on this and I'm using it, darn it! With bungie cords in hand it took forever to find the dolly in the dark, messy garage. I'm cursing my beloved yard guy for his workers barricading the dolly with all the summer umbrellas and furniture. Once again, noting how fortunate I am that I have him and a pool that requires a lot of summer umbrellas. Ah, summer, my old friend. If I were only complaining about the heat .... apparently I lapsed into a fantasy.  
I finally get the dolly out and the wheels are flat (Could I have checked the tires before I struggled to get it out? I could have reached in there, but no, that would be thinking ahead which I was not going to do that day). The flat tires were a blessing, though, because I would've dragged the dolly down the hill and tried to get the generator out of the car and securely tied to the dolly, and drag it, step by step up a 20% grade with 6 in. of snow. Or so I thought.  The farthest I could have gotten would be to get it on the ground ... and then have to leave it there. Sometimes my determination interferes with common sense, which I usually have a lot of. 

I walked back down the drive to get some things from the car and a young man stopped. OK, so I flagged him down. He was able to back the car down to the road so it was parked and stable. He was reassuring when I said “Its ok if the car slides into the ditch and falls over. We’ll just pull out the generator so the gas doesn’t leak, and I have AAA”.  See, I was trying to think ahead. Apparently it is really hard to get a car to fall over. And if it did the generator would have gone through glass, it would have been a hughes mess. Thank goodness cars just don't do that. This fellow had a jacked up truck, that could easily cruse over the snow, but his tires were bald.  So he left a message for his friend (and a neighbor I’ve not met) to stop by when he returned home. The neighbor had chains on his truck and was out picking up employees for his girlfriend's boss. How good is that? He was a hero for many that day, including me. He loaded up his truck with the generator, set it up for me, and now I have some power!!  What a treat. 

And whomever invented generators was a genus. It saved the food and me from going crazy. Of course, that will be that last power outage while I’m living here. But I have my super duper generator, just in case I am prepared!