Monday, September 14, 2009

Never a Dull Moment

Someone recently commented on this blog that I seem to have a lot of "unique" experiences. People - you have no idea. I choose NOT to blog about my work (much) or Buzz's work (hardly ever) and pretty much the deep, meaningful stuff of my marriage and our families are off-limits too. So, yeah, the REALLY entertaining stuff - I don't even mention here.

But, stuff that happens in my living room? Well here there are no boundaries and so if it happens out here in the OBB it's fair game.

Take Sunday for instance.

On Sunday, we got up at a reasonable hour to finish up the last of the household chores, all the better to enjoy the day. I scrubbed bathrooms, tidied up the kitchen and got a few loads of laundry done. After a fabulous breakfast of veggie omelette made with veggies right out of my garden, Buzz and I discussed what we'd have for dinner...because Lord knows we don't want to go more than a couple of hours without knowing what we'll eat next! After reviewing the full menu of what we've eaten the past 6 nights we decided white meat was out because we've been indulging in chicken, pork and pork and chicken all week and so we decided it would be Beef Tenderloin for Sunday dinner. Buzz took the steaks out of the freezer to defrost and we went about our day.

A couple hours later I was on a long-anticipated and much overdue phone date with my friend Carla when suddenly, right in the middle of a really good story about how someone recently got fired the phone lines went dead. So did the TV. Dammit, so did everything else. Thinking quickly, I jumped up and grabbed our analogue phone and quickly plugged it in so I could continue my gabfest with the west coast (you know, on the other end of the country where all the really good things and people are). Unfortunately the analogue phone doesn't work when there's no power either so there we were...no power and nothing to do.

Right about the time I saw our neighbours evacuate their house to go watch Sunday afternoon football at their son's place I decided I needed to know just when exactly we'd have power returned to the OBB and so grabbed Buzz's cell and started dialing. The less than helpful agent at Maritime Electric informed me that no, it wasn't an island-wide issue and yes, they knew the power was out in the OBB, and no, they didn't know what had caused the outage and no, they had no idea when power would be restored. Super! Thank you!

With a house shining clean from top to bottom and so therefore no chores to be done and with it rainy and wet outside and so nothing to do on the land, we decided we'd pass some time by going for a Sunday afternoon drive. Unlike Saturday night when we went for a drive to the beach we did not take the dogs with us and so we locked them in the house as we drove off in search of houses with signs of electricity, just so we could figure out how far this outage was.

We were only gone about an hour and when we came home the power was still out. "Fine," I thought, "this is a perfect opportunity for Buzz to help me with some stretching." You see, I have a bad back which is exacerbated when my T-bands get too tight and the only way to effectively stretch them is to lie on my back with my foot resting on Buzz's stomach while he pushes my leg back over my head, releasing the tension in my back. It works every time.

So, I mention to him as we're coming in the house that I could use his help in stretching my back and start to make my way to the living room. I rounded the corner from the kitchen and you know those Beef Tenderloin steaks we had left defrosting on the kitchen counter a couple of hours ago? Uh huh. The remnants of their plastic bag were strewn from one end of the dog bed to the other. WTF. SOMEONE who shall remain nameless but looks an awful lot like a big brown dog, ate our dinner...in the raw.

Power was finally restored about 3:15, but by then it was too late to take out another steak and have it defrosted in time for an early dinner. So instead we made due with left-over mushroom stew & rice with a salad which Buzz enhanced with a couple of peanut butter sandwiches. Not exactly the kind of Sunday dinner we're accustomed to, but you know, when you have an always starving dog, this is sometimes your reality.

Classes are in session starting today. Buzz is working on budget all this week. Since I don't write much about my work and seldom about his, and with this week being such a busy week for both of us on the employment front, I hope to have time to write here each day, but if I don't, just keep checking back in. I'm sure someone will pop a boob (you can read about that here) or insult my age (you can read about that here) or something else will happen to provide lots of blog fodder!