'Twas the day before Christmas and all down the street, Nothing was working not even the heat!

Christmas eve we woke up to find our power had gone out. This had happened a few days before and was out for a couple of hours. Ever sense then we had, had several flickers and brief periods of no power so we were hoping this would be the case again. The power outage might have been due to the all the wind we have been having. Around 9am after the power had been out for about 4 hours Tom called the power plant. They said there were about 14 homes that were out of power and they needed to send in a line man from Barrow. He would be coming in a search and rescue plane and would get here as soon as he could.

When I was a kid I always thought it was exciting to have the power go out but with it being pitch dark and slowly getting colder and colder in our apartment some of the excitment turns into frustration. Not to mention all of our Christmas activities would be difficult without light or electricity. We of course have some flash light and a hand cranke lanturn but the dim light from those is not enough to do much of anything. As far as the heat perdiciment goes things were not too bad. Although it was -10 degree outside our small apartment did well to hold in the heat. I has tripple paned windows. The back door has two doors with an entry way in between called a "kunichuk" and the front door leads to a hallway that also has a kunichuk. We all dressed warmly and were fairly comfortable most of the time.

At 1pm Tom called again and found out that the line guy had been unable to get of the ground yet. We started making plans for Christmas at the school. As soon as we got too cold we would head over to there. The school still had power but even if it hadn't they have a back up generator. Later the principal called and informed us we could stay at his home which was all the way on the other edge of town. We had, had the school vehicle but the matenance truck wouldn't start that day so they had come to borrow the one we had. (He still has it) I wasn't so excited about a treck accross town in the extreem wind and cold and was really not excited about spending Christmas at the school.

Around 2 or 3pm we saw hope; a line truck drove by our window . By 4:30 our power began to flicker and then came back on. At first we didn't allow ourselves to believe it but we soon began to celibate and clean up our messy house to get it ready for Christmas. We have not had any trouble with our power since but our heat never came back all the way back on. Luckily, as we discovered last year, we are able to heat our apartment just fine between the oven and a small space heater. Hopefully they will come take care of it soon though.