Outage

Oh boy...was last night a doozey! Kellen and I were unfortunate enough to be at the vet's office when electricity went out. Little did we know that it was the electricity for EVERYWHERE in the Brazos Valley. So, unbenownst to us, we drive home with Bailey from the vet's office, a trip that should take 7-12 minutes, depending on traffice, at 5:30 yesterday, but instead of ~ 10 minutes, it took us ~ 35-40 mintues to finally get home. When we did, we discovered that we had zero electricity....and we were with nothing (no surges, browouts, nothing) until after 10 PM last night.

Kellen was a good sport about it at first...we had peanut butter sandwiches in the table in his room - he was excited about having a picnic! When it got dark ~ 7:30, I put him to bed, but with the windows being open to try to get some air, the outside noises (people shooting off fireworks, loud vehicles, etc.) really bothered him, (he was crying, scared, etc.) so he and I snuggled in our recliner for a little while until I finally said enough of this and he and I both went to bed in Mommy's bed (which was a treat for him).

As he was going to sleep, Kellen kept saying, "Mommy, I think the electricity will be back on when I wake up, right?" He was so cute about it! And, it was kinda' difficult to explain electricity to a 3-yr old...I went with, 'You know how your toys need batteries? Well, the lights, TV, computer, refrigerator...all of those things need electricity to work. You know sometimes when the batteries don't work anymore that it makes the toy not work, well that's what going on right now. There is no electricity coming for anything in the house to work.' I think that kind of worked to help him understand, at least somewhat, what was going on...

When the electricity came on for good last night ~ 10 PM, it woke me up - so I went around the house closing all of the windows, turning off lights, etc. Man, it's amazing how dependent we are on the electricity!

Well...today I get to work and it felt like I was walking into a sauna. Apparently, there is a cool water outage - and the cool water helps the HVAC system cool. And it seems that it wasn't just my building that was impacted - it was most, or all, not quite sure about that, of West Campus. This morning the boss just told us if we couldn't take it to go home and come back after lunch...about half of the administrative office chose to do that, but I was really trying to get some stuff done and couldn't. After lunch, a little better, but not much, so at ~ 2:30 - we all left, with permission and blessings from the boss. Yay!

So, I had an afternoon to run errands! I went and looked at beds for Kellen, returned some things to a couple of stores, and then went movie crazy at Wal-Mart! Kellen got a new VeggieTales DVD and then I bought The Little Mermaid, which was released on DVD yesterday, Cinderella, and the new X-Men DVD (the one that Matt promised to take me to see in the movie theater, even though he went and watched it with someone else - can you tell that I never did get to see that in the movie theater?). I picked Kellen up early, we went for a sno-cone, and then back to the house. And he's getting to watch his new VeggieTales as a treat tonight.

Then he's getting in bed on time tonight, because the season premiere of LOST is on! Whoo hoo!!