Almost a week with electricity!

Last week was pretty bad - for all sorts of reasons, but mostly because of the electricity being off for five nights and much of six days. OK I was at work during the week, but it is incredibly depressing to come home from a day at work, and wanting to relax, only to find that the lights are still off. And naturally half of the rechargeable lamps are not working - all right most of them are pretty lousy, and obviously meant for occasional use, not the constant use we can give them. Then we more or less ran out of kerosene, and even the kerosene lanterns and lamps we have don't work properly. Sigh. Oh, and I forgot, only one of the solar lanterns works, and even that didn't charge on some days, because it was so gloomy and raining. And I had forgotten I had some packets of candles, so we had to buy more of those! So whatever way, I couldn't really win. I guess it is time to invest in some new lamps of all sorts.

There were funny elements - carrying two or three chargers to work - for a lamp and phones, with all the trailing cables. I remembered too late that one of them was supposed to work in the car, but obviously some of the brain cells had gone off with the electricity.

And then there is all the food which went bad. The fridge was the first to be cleaned out - though I have found that yogurt which is definitely spoiled for ordinary eating will still do fine in cakes! [Waste not, want not, as my mother would say!]. Then the freezer - after three days that needed to be cleared out too - since we tend to store a whole lot of food in the freezer rather than in the fridge. And everyone uses the freezer as basically a slightly colder version of the fridge!

We went to ECG on two mornings - and we were not alone in our irritation (and lack of ironed clothes!) and they did promise to do something about it - only it happened on their time, and not ours.

We don't have a generator, though the house next door to us does, though it didn't work very consistently, and it is horribly noisy... Advantage: you do get some lights from their outside security lights... Major disadvantage: interrupted sleep!

So that's probably why I didn't feel more rested during this whole period - even though I was going to bed earlier than normal...

My gripe for the week? month?