Power!

A lot was going on here while we were all at the Zoo last Friday. Ever since we’ve been living in this cabin, the generator has been living next to the camper in a redneck outbuilding made of spare zinc roofing panels, Tinkerbell’s cap, and some lumber scraps. Since you probably know my favorite excuse for not keeping up with computer stuff is that we didn’t run the generator, you’ve probably figured out that we run it as little as possible and try to run it only when we have at least two or three pressing reasons to turn it on and let it suck diesel and frazzle our nerves with the incessant noise.


Since we’re getting ready to open our doors to guests, we need to get it moved to a place where it isn’t an eyesore and where its noise won’t be quite so intrusive. A small cement pad was down near the shop, so we decided to get some block and turn that pad into a new generator hut. However, neither Tom nor Selwyn know any of the tricks to laying block, so we called Damion and Augusto and asked if they’d done it before. They had, so Tom got the block, concrete, and sand, and hired them to come and build it. They worked on it for a few hours on Friday and finished it on Saturday, and now it just needs to have the door hung and a roof put on top. We can use the spare zinc that’s in its current redneck hut, so Tom and Selwyn will probably move it tomorrow. I can’t wait for relative peace and quiet!

The other news regarding electricity is that we may get more peace and quiet than we expect even with the generator stowed away from the cabins. It looks like we really are going to get electricity, although we’re not sure where it’s coming from, and we’re not sure when it will actually get here. We had heard that the 7 Miles chairman had requested it for our neighbors and us, but 7 Miles village is two miles from here, so we didn’t have a lot of hope that it would be run from there to here. It’s only about a mile away in the other direction, but we hadn’t heard any rumors that we’d get it from that direction. But, over the weekend, Tom talked to Julio and was told that the grand plan was to run the lines the mile from the San Antonio to here to give us power relatively quickly, and then to run the line from 7 Miles to here because San Antonio is already about tapped out, and if that town could join up with the 7 Miles lines, everybody would have a better power supply.

From what we saw yesterday, that seems to be what they’re doing. The surveyors have put stakes all the way up the road from 7 Miles to here, and from the other direction the drilling truck was setting the actual utility poles between the end of the San Antonio line and here. We still have no feel at all for how long this will take, but it looks like the power company is not only putting in time, but also money to install the poles. A few people have asked us if we’ll get connected if/when it gets this far, and all we can say is “You bet!” We haven’t felt that we’ve been under any hardship living here for the past year without power. We have the generator, and we’ve figured out how to do most things without electricity, but it would be really nice to not have to eventually buy a solar system, and to use the generator just for backup – and to have lights, and computer use whenever we want it, and appliances, and…the list goes on.