I awoke this morning to the sound of light rain which had started sometime during the overnight.  The landscapers were supposed to be back first thing this morning to continue working on the retaining walls in the back, but the rain had made the work site muddy enough that I figured they would not be here today, which turned out to be the case.  The clouds cleared off by mid-morning and by early afternoon the site had dried out enough that they could have continued with the hand work.  With tomorrow being a holiday, however, I did not expect them to begin their workday at 1 PM.

After we had breakfast I left around 10 AM to drive to Adams Distributing in Novi to return a pair of battery chargers.  I visited with Scotty (AC8IL) for a while discussing his ham radio setup.  Since getting back into the hobby after many years he has done very well making DX (long distance) contacts all over the world.

I got back around 11:30 AM and our son and grand-daughter showed up shortly thereafter.  Today was Brendan and Shawna’s third wedding anniversary and we all agreed it was an opportune time for Madeline to have her first sleepover at our house, allowing her parents some much needed adult only time.  Brendan brought the porta-crib and portable stroller, and transferred the car seat to Linda’s car.  Brendan visited until it was time for Madeline’s nap and left once she was asleep.

Madeline had a good long nap and woke up refreshed and ready to go.  And go she did; we played with toys, read books, explored the main floor of the house, and went for an explore in the yard.  We have a five acre parcel, so it was an extended exploration.

For dinner, Linda cooked some Dr. Praeger’s vegan burgers and served them with sliced parsnips with sautéed in a small amount of water and quinoa with dried cranberries.  Madeline enjoyed all of it, along with some peas and strawberries.  I have not had parsnips very many times in my life.  When sautéed they taste like slightly peppery cooked carrots, which tend to be sweet.

We had more play time after dinner until 7:30 PM when Linda got her ready for bed and she had her evening bottle.  She was tucked in her porta-crib at 7:45 PM and quickly drifted gently off to sleep.  Brendan also brought their baby monitor and set it up, so we were able to keep an eye on her without opening the door to the bedroom and possibly disturbing her.

We stayed up a little while longer and then turned in around 9:30 PM to watch another episode of Doc Martin.  At 10:12 PM we lost power for a few seconds and a minute later it happened again.  We received a couple of e-mail notifications from our standby generator regarding the loss of utility power but never got one indicating that the generator had started.  Apparently the outages were too short to trigger the start sequence.

Even though most of the critical electronics in the house are connected to uninterruptible power supplies, I got up and shut down all of the computers, NAS units, and the laser printer.  The power flickered a couple more times but we never lost our Internet and were able to watch the last 10 minutes of Doc Martin.  Our last message from the generator indicated that it would stop notifying us of the situation until the fault had cleared for 24 hours.  The generator ran a successful self test at noon today, as it does every Thursday, so I was confident that it would start if needed.  We had a power outage while we were away this past winter during which the generator started and the automatic transfer switch transferred the house to the generator, so I was also confident that all if this would work if needed.

The worst part of this kind of momentary power outage is that the UPS units all start beeping (an alarm) as soon as they lose AC power.  It’s kind of like a smoke detector or other alarm going off; it tends to jolt you awake and once up it is hard to go back to sleep as you lie there anticipating the next alarm.