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On Wednesday, April 5, just before 3pm, while I was on a call with a customer, my power went out.

That morning I had awoken early to deliver a stool sample to the Pierrefonds CLSC and fortunately for my trip there and back, arriving home before 9am, the freezing rain hadn't yet started.

It began in earnest at around 10am and continued into the evening pretty much without a pause. At peak, across the province, there were 1.1M households and businesses without electricity.

For the remaining daylight on Wednesday when I had no power I started reading a book, Catseye by Andre Norton. At around the time the sun was setting I went into the city and ate a meal at Subway and came home to a dark and 17c apartment.

Thursday, the power did not come back, I finished that book and read to completion The Masks of Time by Robert Silverberg. Again, went into the city and this time ate a big meal at Mr. Steer; that was the only food I ate that day.

Friday, the power did not come back, I finished the book, started and finished reading Judgement on Janus by Andre Norton, and again went into the city to eat a mid afternoon Subway meal; sitting in the food court where it was warm for a few hours, to come home to my 15c powerless apartment.

Throughout this time the downtown part of the city never lost power because all of the power cables are underground there, so no ice-laden tree branches (or trees) could fall on them.

I messaged my boss Friday evening, that as I was scheduled to work on Saturday, I would find a way to do it, even if electricity hadn't come back yet.

Saturday morning I awoke and my apartment was at 12c, I took a very cold quick shower then went to my mother-in-law's house (who had recovered power the day previous) and with a bit of trial and error got my work laptop to connect to their Wifi.

I had a tab open on my work laptop of the Hydro Quebec site showing the outage map (as seen in the image at the top of this post) where I had zoomed in to where my apartment was. By about 11:15AM I noticed that my apartment complex was no longer oranged off as being without electricty, so I took the next bus home.

My apartment was at 14c when I got there, and it took until the next day, with the help of the afternoon sun shining in to my apartment, to warm it back up to the normal 21c or 22c. So dressed in layers I continued to work through until 5pm when my shift was over.

I emptied both my fridge and freezer of almost everything as it had all likely gone bad and I didn't want to risk anything. My most sad loss was the 7 beyond beef packages of simili-ground beef that were frozen and that I had bought over time at a 3$ discount from regular price. Today I went to the grocery store and found they were still 3$ off, so I bought three which are now in the freezer again.

Over Friday and Saturday I also read Collision Course by Robert Silverberg. I quite enjoyed this one. I started writing a synopsis of it, but it got too long; I wouldn't want to rewrite the whole book, so you can read about it here.