This morning, right before I was going to shower, Neysia told me that we were out of electricity. Here, you prepay for electricity by taking a card that is in your electric box (ours is in a cabinet in the kitchen) and having it reloaded. The electricity comes in units, and when you get home you just put some numbers in on the box and then a few seconds later, you have electricity.
I only know this because we ran out once before.
Here was the main problem this morning - we didn't have electricity, so we thought our garage doors wouldn't open. Which means we couldn't get our car out. Which means we would have to walk to the petrol station (the gas station - where we buy electricity). Neysia and Sasha ended up going, and they were back within 30 minutes. The man at the petrol station said that Mount Croix (our district) was having a blackout.
We heard about these blackouts before we came - that they happened, that they could be pretty irregular, that it was hard to know how long it would last. But we haven't experienced one until now.
It's really not that bad, because it's light outside. Neysia and Sasha got the garage door open after they came back (as luck would have it), so we're free to leave if we don't want to be here. My laptop still has charge, and my cell phone too - though it will probably die in an hour or so. We just don't have tv (we've only been watching movies on it anyway - our DSTV isn't hooked up yet) or anything like that. But so far, it's been okay.
In other news, Aberdeen's (a wooden furniture place) delivered by wardrobe today. I don't know how they made it up our front steps and around all the corners in our house, but they did. Good thing they are professionals. My clothes are FINALLY hung up - no more suitcase, no more bookshelf (which is what they were crammed into before). It looks nice in my room, I'll have to take a picture. And the wood smell is nice.
The power just came back on. Looks like that one lasted about 2.5 hours. Not bad, not bad.
Oh, life.
-Tara.
