It has been more than five and a half days and seven nights since we lost power. It will be six full days at 8:45 this evening and the forecast high for tomorrow is 27 degrees.

Though Ameren IP has assured us that they are doing their best to restore power to the greatest number of people as soon as possible, I drove through our immediate neighborhood yesterday and couldn’t help but come away extremely pessimistic about our situation. There were still downed power lines in some of the smaller streets and I simply can’t imagine our circuit being turned on before those are fixed. Perhaps we are just not a great enough number of people to matter at this point.

The company’s latest statment on their “Outage Information Page” exclaims:

More than 400,000 customers have had their power restored since the ice storm of December 1. More than 7,000 field personnel, including crews from 14 states, are working to restore power.

That may be true, but I’m out of patience and am about ready to walk into their office, which is just a few blocks away, with an extension chord and ask them if I can plug my house into their outlet.