Power Outage

So it's Friday night, we are waiting for Dave to get home after being stuck inside the house for ten hours. Claire has eaten her dinner already because it was taking Dave extra long to get home due to the rain (apparently, rain is to Mexico as snow is to Michigan) and the fact that he had to stop by Superama to set up an appointment for the propane company to come out (because they never came back this week like they said).

I was just finishing up our dinner when the lights went out. Of course, my first thoughts were, "I'm not using that much power that I shut everything down, am I?", then thoughts from the movie Scream popped into my mind. Frustrated and tired of answering Claire's statement of, "turn the lights back on Mommy" about ten times, I called Dave. He was at Superama dealing with the propane company. He was also suppose to pick up milk at the store, which I told him to forget about and get home! It was about 6:15 pm and we were on borrowed daylight.

So earlier in the week it was no propane, which meant heat, stove, and hot water. Now, we were dealing with no electricity, which meant no phone, lights, and also heat in the bedrooms (as those run on electricity). Thank goodness in my packing frenzy before we left, I packed a small LED flashlight, otherwise the house would have been lit up by the illumination of our cell phones!

Dave got home and let me know that it was the entire neighborhood that was without power, which squashed the two previous thoughts of overusing power and mass murderers. Still frustrated nonetheless, we ate a semi-cold dinner by hanging the flashlight from the chandelier. It was suppose to be Family Movie Night, but without electricity and no idea when it would be back on, we weren't thrilled about using the computer battery so early in the evening, so we decided to head out to the mall.

The mall is pretty close and it is fairly new. A few common stores that are inside were Athlete's Foot, Nike, and Osh Kosh. Since Christmas is such a huge deal here, the decorations were still up and that made Claire happy, but confused at the same time because she was wondering when we were having Christmas again.

Most of the stores in the mall are the usual clothing stores so not much for Claire (or I at the moment) to look at, but we did check out the movie theater and a few pet stores, which they have two inside the mall!?!

The pet stores were quite similar to those in the US with rabbits, ferrets, a ton of birds and fish, mice, snakes, spiders, lizards, and dogs. The one unusual thing though was that there were no cats. They sold all the usual pet foods and supplies, including cat food.

On a side note: Back when we were potty training Claire, we told her that when she was potty trained, we would get her a fish. Well, with the move, we thought we better wait until we got to Mexico and that would be a good pet to have here. Looking at the prices of the everything was a little bit of a shock. For a critter cage fish set-up, the price was $30. No filter, but it did come with the rocks, decorations, etc. Even a regular small fish bowl was around $20. (I kept thinking about all the critter cages that I had at school for the science kits!) A gold fish was around $6.00, albeit they were of a heftier variety. That being said, we are still not sure on the verdict of getting a fish.

The largest store in the mall is called Liverpool. It would be equivalent to Sears in the US with selling a little bit of EVERYTHING! This is where Dave bought our dryer. When he purchased the dryer, he got a giftcard for $80, but of course, we left that at home!

Throughout the mall I kept seeing advertisements for Krispy Kreme, which is funny because I had just been thinking about doughnuts earlier in the day and I never eat them. So, now I was on a mission to find Krispy Kreme! We had walked throughout the entire mall and had pretty much given up. We went back into Liverpool to look through the store and there it was!!! The bad thing is that the store was just about to close so all the regular doughnuts were gone! Not to leave without getting at least one doughnut we settled on the one of two flavors of chocolate frosting with white sugar cream in the middle. Not my favorite, but Claire was pretty happy with it.

It was time to head back home and the whole time I was crossing my fingers and toes that the electricity was back on, but getting to the gate of the development, it was clear that it wasn't. We all came inside, got pajamas on, brushed our teeth, and crawled into our bed to watch a little bit of Finding Nemo before falling asleep. I wasn't about to leave Claire in her room without the power on for many reasons, but one was that not knowing when it was going to come back on and not knowing what lights were on and where. I didn't want her waking up in the middle of the night because her room was flooded with light.

We all fell asleep for awhile, but around 2, I woke up and couldn't fall asleep. There is something about complete and utter darkness that is unsettling to me. I am used to the street lights that are on outside our window and being in a strange place with nothing but darkness left me sitting awake listening for strange noises.

Hearing Dave stirring, I told him I couldn't sleep so he offered to go get my Ipod so I could play some games. Ironically, while he was in the kitchen getting it, the lights came on. He was able to get all the lights turned off and with my street lights outside peeking in and my Ipod, I finally fell asleep an hour later.

I don't know how often this happens. Dave said it has happened once before on a Sunday afternoon for about 5 minutes, but he has also been at work most days so he may not even have known that the lights were out. All I know, is that after a long week getting used to a new place and things, troubles with heat and propane and lights, I am glad they are back on for this rainy Saturday.