Brush with the Law, and time to get the Red Generator out

It’s been a funny old day – one of those days when the skies are overcast but the temperatures are hot, humid, and sultry.  I was travelling to the hair dressers in the morning when the line of traffic was stopped by the police.  A policeman pulled me over and I wound down the window.  “We’re checking warrants and registrations, madam”, he said, and as I suspected, both of mine were correct.  Luckily Robin takes care of these car related duties for me.  On my return trip home I was stopped again, this time they were checking for alcohol.  I counted, as instructed, from one to ten into the small hand held device, and was waved on.  It was lucky that they were not checking for coffee, or chocolate, as I may well have failed the test on that score.  So that was my brush with the law this morning.

Right on lunch time the power went out.  In a case like this, you never know if it is just your house which is affected, your suburb,  whether the fault covers a much larger area, or it could well be a major disaster that we haven’t heard about  because the radio has gone off.  And of course we never know how  long the power will be off for.  Robin sprung into action and fired up the big red generator, keeping both the refrigerator in the kitchen, and the deep freeze in the garage running.   We had just been down to collect our Christmas ham, so he felt rather pleased that we had an alternative to the power cut. 

Our trusty red generator

We have since found out that  a connection to the Huntly power station was lost at 12.30pm. As a result, up to 500 MW of power supply was shed in the North Island to protect the transmission system.   Widespread outages were reported throughout the Auckland and Wellington regions, and it has been confirmed that 30 per cent of the North Island had been affected by the outages.  Traffic lights in affected areas were not working, and drivers were encouraged to use common sense and the right hand rule, the police central communications advised.  Drivers were reminded to "Give way to your right - just treat it as an uncontrolled intersection."  Our power was finally restored after two hours, and the red generator proved it’s worth.

Muffy wasn’t bothered at all by these happenings.  She was quite happy trying to keep cool while curled up on Robin’s seat.  Not too tightly curled, we noticed, it was much too hot for that.  She seemed to be all legs as she snoozed the afternoon away.

How Muffy copes with the heat