Another weird weekend
Jan. 24th, 2010 05:28 pmUgh. Another weird weekend. Firstly, Alex has been sleeping really, really badly for about a week now. Teething issues I think, but very, very tiring and frustrating. Me & Hubs have had very little time or energy for ourselves or each other. Itching for some time away from Mummying, I made last-minute plans to go shopping/lunching at Lakeside with
violetcreme on Saturday. Both children also have colds and were knackered on Friday, so we had pizza, gave the kids an early night and were done with the washing up etc pretty early and looking forward to a chilled couple of hours together on Friday night. Watch QI, maybe an episode of The Wire, maybe even a film.
The power went out at ten to nine, just as we were waiting for QI to start. The day nursery over the road has one of those burglar alarms that automatically goes off when the power goes out, and does not, as we discovered, switch itself off after any less than about an hour and a half... and then erratically continues to go off while the power remains out. Nobody came to switch it off themselves, because nobody was there. I really don't see what the point of something that automatically goes off so often and doesn't stop is - surely an alarm relies on the goodwill of your neighbours - if all it does is go off for no good reason and piss them off, if you are ever broken into, they'll just roll their eyes & curse the alarm again instead of checking it out or calling the rozzers. It is the alarm that cries Wolf.
The power cut, and the resulting loud, whining, persistent alarm continued until about 6 in the morning. We did not get much sleep. By the time I got to Lakeside, I was starting to see everything through a furze of surreality. Tiredness aside, Lakeside was a blast. Miss C made me laugh by calling escalators 'The Moving Stairs'. We loudly discussed Twitter, writing and TV in Starbucks, much to the obvious annoyance of a man in a nearby table who was reading a paper. It's a cafe, not a library, dickwad, we'll talk if we want to! We decided that all Telly People live together in one big house, with a special annexe flat for the Jewish ones. Maureen Lipmann cooks the tea, apparently. Maybe Newspaper Man was just glaring because he didn't understand irony. I did the Mum Thing of going out to get stuff for me and ending up with lots of presents for the kids. Alas, The Disney Store was to much of a temptation. Vi now owns a Little Mermaid Dollie, Alex a Winnie The Pooh Teddy.
Luckily, Mum had also made last-minute plans to come down this weekend, and provided us with childcare help and, possibly even more importantly, an excuse to go and get a Chinese instead of cooking.
I spent all last night paranoid that our power was going to go again. This was largely because, from 6am on Saturday morning until an unspecified time during last night, our power was supplied via an emergency generator. It was a massive thing - as big as a lorry, parked just outside the substation, which isn't far from our house. We could constantly hear the low hum of it as it churned out electricity. Now, I was really impressed about this - when I was little, if you had a power cut then the power stayed off til the problem was fixed, be that hours, days or longer. I hadn't expected the power suppliers to go to the trouble of bringing us an emergency generator for 24 hours. Its steady hum, combined with the memory of a miserable Friday night, however, still made me feel really vulnerable. We rely on electricity for so much - we have no gas oven or hob, and even our boiler won't work without electricity. I don't like being reminded of how much my comfort & that of my family changes is affected by the loss of one utility.
Everything's back to normal again now, except that I'm still brooding over my addiction to electricity. Well, that and my plans to make leaving wailing burglar alarms overnight a criminal offense.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
The power went out at ten to nine, just as we were waiting for QI to start. The day nursery over the road has one of those burglar alarms that automatically goes off when the power goes out, and does not, as we discovered, switch itself off after any less than about an hour and a half... and then erratically continues to go off while the power remains out. Nobody came to switch it off themselves, because nobody was there. I really don't see what the point of something that automatically goes off so often and doesn't stop is - surely an alarm relies on the goodwill of your neighbours - if all it does is go off for no good reason and piss them off, if you are ever broken into, they'll just roll their eyes & curse the alarm again instead of checking it out or calling the rozzers. It is the alarm that cries Wolf.
The power cut, and the resulting loud, whining, persistent alarm continued until about 6 in the morning. We did not get much sleep. By the time I got to Lakeside, I was starting to see everything through a furze of surreality. Tiredness aside, Lakeside was a blast. Miss C made me laugh by calling escalators 'The Moving Stairs'. We loudly discussed Twitter, writing and TV in Starbucks, much to the obvious annoyance of a man in a nearby table who was reading a paper. It's a cafe, not a library, dickwad, we'll talk if we want to! We decided that all Telly People live together in one big house, with a special annexe flat for the Jewish ones. Maureen Lipmann cooks the tea, apparently. Maybe Newspaper Man was just glaring because he didn't understand irony. I did the Mum Thing of going out to get stuff for me and ending up with lots of presents for the kids. Alas, The Disney Store was to much of a temptation. Vi now owns a Little Mermaid Dollie, Alex a Winnie The Pooh Teddy.
Luckily, Mum had also made last-minute plans to come down this weekend, and provided us with childcare help and, possibly even more importantly, an excuse to go and get a Chinese instead of cooking.
I spent all last night paranoid that our power was going to go again. This was largely because, from 6am on Saturday morning until an unspecified time during last night, our power was supplied via an emergency generator. It was a massive thing - as big as a lorry, parked just outside the substation, which isn't far from our house. We could constantly hear the low hum of it as it churned out electricity. Now, I was really impressed about this - when I was little, if you had a power cut then the power stayed off til the problem was fixed, be that hours, days or longer. I hadn't expected the power suppliers to go to the trouble of bringing us an emergency generator for 24 hours. Its steady hum, combined with the memory of a miserable Friday night, however, still made me feel really vulnerable. We rely on electricity for so much - we have no gas oven or hob, and even our boiler won't work without electricity. I don't like being reminded of how much my comfort & that of my family changes is affected by the loss of one utility.
Everything's back to normal again now, except that I'm still brooding over my addiction to electricity. Well, that and my plans to make leaving wailing burglar alarms overnight a criminal offense.