In threes?

To cap an up and down week (wood stove tiling, dishwasher), what better than a good old smoking tree story? Kirsty came complaining of the lights in the kitchen being out - no circuits were blown. This got even more confusing as it would appear more than one circuit was out. I asked her to try the stove - when she turned it on she turned on the rest of the lights... Great.

Actually that made it easy to diagnose - one half of the circuit board was not being powered. The stove, being 220v has to bridge both sides of the circuit board (110v each) to get the voltage it needs, so switching it on re-powered the dead side. The power comes into the house on two 110v lines - I wandered over to my neighbors, but they had everything working fine. That's when I paid close attention to the wires from my pole - only to see that where they went through the v of a tree, the tree was smoking. Being the electrical genius that I am, I figured that this was probably an abnormal situation. As I like to get to know my local emergency peeps, I called them up, knowing they would also expedite the appearance of the power company. One police car, firetruck, and electrical company later - plenty of power, no smoking trees, and no money (power company's) leaking to earth. Oh, and we had an inch of snow combined with the largest snow flakes I've ever seen.