Friday evening there were Oncor trucks in my neighborhood when I got home. However, my power was still out, so I drove to Home Depot and picked up a 100' extension cord (14-gauge). My neighbor let me plug into her outdoor outlet. I had to add my old 50' cord to reach the fridge. The fridge was quiet and sounded a little funny, so I suspect that the long cords caused some loss of voltage. But the compressor did run, and the fridge cooled. I ate a spinach and seafood salad and finished reading Wintersmith and The Parsifal Mosaic by candlelight. Both books were good, as was the salad. At some point in the night, I woke to see my alarm clock flashing. Apparently the power came on shortly after I went to bed. Saturday morning I drove up past Addison to finish up a tiling job. It was a stupid situation that I could have avoided. The shower in this bathroom leaked, so they tore it out and repaired the plumbing, then reinstalled it. In the process of remodeling, they also replaced the sink cabinet with one that has a slightly smaller footprint, leaving a small gap to the tile in front of it. I had filled in the missing tiles around the shower, but left the cabinet gap alone thinking that we would cover it with baseboard and shoe mold when the time comes to do the trim. But the client wasn't happy, so Saturday I went back and cut little strips of tile and filled in the gap. It doesn't look all that great; the tiles were cut around the old cabinet, so the patch job doesn't match the grout lines of the rest of the floor. But I didn't feel like proposing that I tear out those three tiles and cut new ones to fit more precisely. If she doesn't like it, we can still cover most of it with baseboards and shoe mold... My tile client referred me to a neighbor who wanted an estimate on baseboards. A smoker. Yuck. I measured 125 feet of baseboards in the downstairs of her condo. She had already torn out the old 2 1/4" baseboards, and wants to put in 3 1/2" or wider trim. I wrote up my estimate, and we agreed that we might do it later this summer. I hope it's while she's away, so I don't have to deal with the smoke. I was supposed to work for two other ladies in that complex on Saturday. One had a commitment and left just as I arrived. (Just as well. She's draining to be around.) The other only needed her doors rekeyed, so I took the cylinders out of her locks when I first arrived, then went back over to reinstall them when I was done with the tiling and the estimate, only to find she hadn't gone to Home Depot yet! So I watched the SciFi channel in her living room and waited... It took all of fifteen minutes to reinstall the two cylinders and a doorknob. I charged for an hour's work and drove home, not particularly happy about one hour's wages for almost five hours and 64 miles. But that's the way it goes sometimes. ***** With regard to the impact of the power outage: it did interesting things to the ice cream, and the lowest bin in my fridge door had an inch of water from the melting bag of ice, but I don't think I lost anything. All the important food was at least cool, even if it thawed a little around the edges. The milk didn't sour. So it could have been a lot worse. Apparently many people were still without power through Saturday, with temperatures in the upper 90s. Today I'm going up to our agency's Frisco office to fix a broken conference table. I'll take an agency van. Otherwise I have to go through the complications of requesting mileage reimbursement, and that would be awkward, since it's not one of my regular duties. It's unusual for my two jobs to coincide. | 
