OmegaDad just called the sheriff on me.

I was sitting in the office, scanning blogs and thinking of drifting off to bed, when the Dawg began barking.  This turned into the frenzied, growling, snarling bark that means "someone is on my porch and I am going to rip the jugular out of that intruder!"  The Dawg is very handy as a burglar alarm this way.

I pad out into the living room, wondering why Jim (our neighbor down the street, sweet, learing disabled, and paranoid) might be calling on us this late at night.  He likes to stop by and give us notice of the latest news about skulkers and intruders, or to just tell us, "I'm doin' alright, ma'am, so don't you worry about me!", or to ask advice about a treed porcupine, or, as he did a day ago, to drop off a little flashing light gizmo for OmegaDotter to take trick-or-treating.

A flashlight is sweeping back and forth from the porch.  I sweep back the curtain from the doors and peer out.  There's an official looking female person there.  I open the door.

Official looking female person says, in a very firm voice, "Please hold that dog, ma'am!"  I grab the Dawg's collar and tell him to sit, which he does, while growling, barking, slavering, and generally behaving like Cujo.

"Are you married to Mr. OmegaMom?" she asks, and my immediate thought is, "Oh Sweet Jesus, something's happened to him!"

Well, no.  (Thank heavens.)  Turns out he had been trying to call all night long, got worried, and rousted out officialdom to come check on me.

Awwww.

See, when OmegaDotter and I had returned home from the ice skating rink and dinner at the Pirate Captain's Mexican restaurant, and I was dealing with dotter demanding a movie, and Dawg demanding his welcome-home pig's ear, and I was trying to put things away, and the wooly kitten was getting underfoot and mewing, the phone rang, it was OmegaDad, and I was--at that point--ready to scream, so told him to please call back in 15 minutes.

Fifteen minutes passed...no call.

Half an hour passed...no call.

When forty-five minutes had passed, I picked up the phone to dial him up.  And got...

Air hiss.

One of the joys--or side effects--of living in Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods is that various utilities are somewhat unreliable.  We have a locally owned small water company, and every once in a while, someone hits a water main or the power on the pump at the main well goes or (on hot summer days) everyone starts watering their lawns at once.  The result is no water.  (The previous owner, a miserly sort, was rumored to purchase repair equipment--such as pieces of water mains or Very Important Valves--second hand from other locally owned water companies, just to save money.)  We have electricity that goes out every time it snows heavily, though it usually comes on again within a day.  We just dig out the oil lanterns, fire up the wood stove, and snuggle up in the living room for the night.  The electricity also goes out for an hour or two here and there; we're used to resetting all the electric clocks on a regular basis.

And we have, for some unknown reason, a phone line that goes kaput whenever there's a heavy rain.  My suspicion is that the main line gets flooded and things just go haywire.  A phone company repair truck is a permanent fixture at a particular spot on the main road out; OmegaDad and I have joked that they should just put a maintenance depot there and be done with it.  Rumor has it that (someday) the phone company is planning to replace the main line into HDEW.

It rained extremely heavily late this afternoon.

Anyway, I informed the official looking female person that the phone was out, and she chuckled and said, wisely, "The rain?"  Then she reassured me that she would contact the dispatcher and the dispatcher would contact OmegaDad, and all would be well.

Thus, my excitement for the night.

Technorati: Sheriff, phones, rural utilities