Does the electric company take bribes?
It rained yesterday. And that’s a complete understatement. It didn’t just rain. It poured. I considered building an arc. A guy I work with didn’t have an umbrella [not that it would have helped since it was raining sideways]. When he walked in to the office he could have literally wrung out his clothing and had enough water for a full bath. He was dripping all over his desk and in to his keyboard on his laptop. I’m surprised he didn’t short the whole thing out. He spent the whole day with two fans blowing on him. One at his feet. One at chest level on his desk. I think he was finally dry somewhere around 4pm.
Around 7:45 it finally stopped raining. Briefly. The kids took that as an opportunity to ask if they could jump in the pool. Um… (1) I don’t know if you noticed, but there were torrential downpours all day. (2) It looks like it’s going to rain again any minute. And (3) there are puddles in the yard with more water in them then the pool right now. So yeah. The answer to that question was “No.”
By 8:30 the floods had returned.
A few minutes after ten, we lost power. And just like last time the neighbors across the street still had power. It’s like they were mocking us. Sitting there in their living rooms. Watching TV. Laughing at the people across the street who have no electricity. Do they pay some extra fee to the electric company, under the table or something? I need to know.
10pm happens to be the kids’ summer bedtime so we had them brush their teeth by candlelight and jump in bed. Even Keaton went to bed. Because what’s the use of living with no power and no access to World of Warcraft or MySpace? [I joke about this, but wait until you get to the next paragraph.]
That left Lee and I with nothing to do. We’re night people. We can’t go to bed at 10pm. But what could we do?
I left my laptop locked in my drawer at work. But we had Lee’s laptop. So I pulled it out and started to play Freecell while Lee ran up to find a gas station with power to fill up my van. It just so happened with nothing to do we remembered the van was out of gas.
When he got back we came up with a new plan. We grabbed Season 1 of Lost on DVD and headed to the garage. Yep, you guessed it. While the kids were sawing logs we were sitting in the garage watching Lost on the small DVD player in the van. We are so cool.
We headed to bed around midnight. Just as Lee was opening the bedroom window and bitching about how it was going to get so hot in the house without the air, the electricity flipped back on. It was like magic. If we had known that was all it took I would have had him open a window around 10:15.
