I've got the power!

Wow! I can now imagine in some tiny tiny way how the poeple of New Orleans felt. We have not had power in the St. Louis area for FOUR FRIGGIN' DAYS. As day two rolled around when it was 90 mother fucking degrees in the house, I kept mumbling "At least we have running water and phone service." (My sister did not even have phone service.) I have sat in the library and the mall. Gone out to eat. Driven around town in my air conditioned car because (a) it was air conditioned and (b) there were no parking places any where because everyone else was going to the library or out to eat. We did have a basement, but it was still hot down there and damn dark. I have taken enough cold baths to make my skin permanently pruney. But after the very hot weather, it was a beautiful cool night last night when we got out of the movies. (The movie houses around here were making a killing on ticket sales.)

I was actually off work on Wednesday because some dumbfuck construction guy (no offense to construction guys) at work hit the transformer and blew out the power. Luckily, I am in a department surrounded by windows so while they let the students out, staff had to wait for the go ahead. So there I was cutting paper with a paper cutter when the guy from the anatomy lab upstairs came down and asked how strong I was. I'm thinking, "Strong enough to use a paper cutter," but I told him "Not that strong." Good answer because next he said, "Cuz we're gonna need help moving THE BODIES." Excuuuuuuuse me???? THE BODIES. I whipped around and said, "Not in my job specs." Apparently, the unused bodies were already stored, but the cadavers that were just "hanging out" on the lab tables needed to be put into the refrigerators that were now being run on generator power. Never even thought about that before. They grabbed some students and some professors who don't mind looking at opened cadavers for a living to stack them up "like cord wood." Gave me the heebie jeebies. We ate the watermelon in the defrosting refrigerator and got the afternoon off work. So I have Wednesday off as a fun day while they fixed the power (after calling us 3 times to tell us "we're off," "we're back on," "we're off again.") at school. That was a fun free day because we had air conditioning at home. But everyone got Thursday off and it wasn't so fun because we had no a/c. Do you know how many people suggested that I turn on a fan to get the air moving? I would IF I HAD ELECTRICTY??? We are so spoiled. We heard last night that when they "flipped the switch," it blew up and exploded into a ball of fire. Rumor was that it would be DAYS before we got back power.

So I left this morning to get my hair cut and went to the mall and the library (where there wasn't a computer available) and then came home to ELECTRICITY. Running around closing windows. (Damn, those tracks in the windows are filthy. I'll clean them later.) Empty water from ice bucket so it doesn't freeze into one solid block of ice. My HUB started throwing out spoiled food yesterday and then remembered we didn't have a garbage disposal. Not a jury would have convicted me if I'd killed the little bastard (which I almost did). Nerves are frayed.

But we have survived. I could play Sudoku in the candle light just so long before I went stark raving mad.