Friday.
1) The caffiene is still not kicked in. Need coffee today, not tea. Daughter has informed me that one of her friends from the States has offered to bring a few bags of flavored coffee beans back for us next week! Yea!!!!
2) Daughter graduates in two weeks. (THAT was a long slog.) They said her dissertation was very good. Now waiting to hear about the next phase.
3) Went into Masala Twist to ask about Christmas meals. Was told we could get the "Festive Lunch" on Christmas Day. Put a deposit down on it. Later than evening was called by them, so sorry, but only the massive big questionably yummy "Christmas Dinner" is available on Christmas Day. Need to go back there to get my deposit back. (Boo, but at least the phoned and were honest about it all. Mistakes happen. I'll definitely go there another time, if for no other reason than that they phoned to let me know about the mistake.)
4) The power went out yesterday afternoon. Had gone out for lunch, came back and everything was off. Looks like it went at about 2:15pm and came back on about 9:00pm. I had a lot of chicken in the fridge, which I think is probably still ok since the fridge remained closed . I'll be canning it later today, just the same, which should kill anything lurking. My big crock-pot full of chili ended up sitting out that whole time as well. I've had it on "warm" overnight and hope it's still ok. We were going to have a tamale making party today, and were going to use the shreddy beef chili as the filling. It is a nice batch, too. I'm thinking that it's probably safer than the chicken, at this point. (Was impressed that the power company phoned three hours into the outage to give me an update - I had phoned on the cell phone to ask if it was just us or widespread. Apparently there was a problem with a cable, so it wasn't just us.)
5) Need to source an emergency power supply in case the power goes again. The heater and pump on my aquarium, of course, were off. I had piled towels around it to try to keep the heat in, but the temp in there went down to 72F. The ambient room temp was in the upper 60s, and the fish seem ok today, but I think that was a close call. If we lose power in a colder time of the year, when the room gets colder, it could be bye-bye for the fishies. We can get by without the filter running for a day (in a pinch) but the heater has to stay on. I have a couple of tea warmers that use the little tea-light candles, and had fired them up and was warming some water up when the power came back on. (And then went out, and then came on again.) Not ideal, but it might have served. Oddly, the lights in the main stairwell were on. The elevator wasn't working. And all the flats in the building had no power. BUT, I found out that I have a real landline, not a VOIP landline! During the outage, Masala Twist phoned and the phone rang.
After the call I lifted the receiver and yes, there was a dial tone! That's good to know! So it appears that here we get our internet over our phone line. In the States I was getting our phone over the internet, so when power went, so did the phone.
So, a good cup of coffee is in my immediate future. Hope you guys have a good Friday/weekend. And if you're back in the States in the N.E., bundle up and stay warm!
