The August snowday that wasn't

The power went out at school the other day, right after lunch. It was a great day- warm, sunny, blue skies, fluffy clouds, just a very light breeze-- certainly not a bad weather day that would knock out power.

We thought it might be a quick off and off thing but a few minutes led to a few more which led to about 30 minutes and so on...

And the really weird thing is how the building was out. My library had one row of lights ON and all my student computers worked but the rest of it- all off. Some rooms had no power, no computers, no 'net. A few rooms had computers but no lights and no 'net. Some had computers and 'net but no lights, etc... you see the weird pattern here, right?

Finally we had to take all our students to the chapel. The school was without power and about half of the other buildings on campus had some various form of power outage as well.

Because of the state mandates and such, we couldn't send the kids back to their residence halls until we had enough school hours to count a full day or we would have to make up a half day. We hung with the kids in the chapel and they watched an educational movie and then we dismissed about 30 minutes early.

We were told that some underground lines had an issue. One of the lines is about 40 years old and it just died completely so the electric company was going to have to dig it all up and then put in a new one. And it was going to have to be dug from the road to the electric pole and transformer about a half a mile away. The power company said it would take 2-3 days, approximately. It happened on a Wednesday so we were told to be at school the next day unless we received a call or text from the principal.

But it looked like a snow day in August! And that would also give us a 4 day weekend, since we don't have school on Fridays!

But the snow day gods weren't on our side, probably because it's August in the Midwest and typically 85 degrees outside.

The principal let us all know we would have school, business as usual. It seems that the power company put a crew on who worked around the clock and gee, they got it done in time for us to have school.

Feh.

But really, it's not that big of a deal because I wouldn't want to have to make up a missed day in August. The thing that usually sucks, though, is that we don't usually get snow days since our kids live on campus. No buses just walking so usually no reason for a snow day, unless the county or state calls a road emergency.

We had school just like normal.

And no snow.

Mags