My kingdom for an electrician!

Something tells me that I offended the Amish gods with my crack about hand-crafting cabinetry last week. The reason for this is that yesterday morning I awoke to find all the power out in my bedroom, as well as the guest bedroom. So, I was forced into a life of Amish bedroom existence, using an oil lamp and candles to light my way around the room trying to figure out what went wrong. Repeated resets of the circuit breaker were to no avail, so I ended up just running a heavy-duty extension cord from my hallway into the room. So now I have either light in my bedroom or use of the internet, depending on which room I run the extension cord into. No doubt, my hyjinks served as great entertainment to J.Po and Spice as they sat watching Blast from the Past on TV from the no doubt “powered just to spite me” living room.

Other than that the weekend was actually a lot of fun. I did some grocery shopping with the GF on Friday (where she gleefully took advantage of access to my car by filling her shopping cart with “the most food I’ve bought at one time in months”) and a quick stop-in at Marshalls where I found* three shirts and three pairs of pants and the GF needed warm weather clothes for her weeklong vacation to Florida. She even found a swimsuit “on the first try” which is apparently a big deal for the lady-folk. It wasn’t as exciting to me (as I always find a swimsuit on the first try, usually without even trying it on) but I tried to appear excited for her sake.

By then J.Po and Spice were in the house, but it was a pretty low-key weekend. We all went out for dinner Saturday night where we met the GF and then followed up with a trip back home and going to bed early. I think that the GF was somewhat shocked by our early-to-bedness, but J.PO and Spice had been traveling all day and we are all really old and kind of nerdy that way. Sunday we went out from brunch, took in the matinee showing of Tartuffe (with talkback afterwards with the actors) and then met the GF for Pizza at Unos downtown**. She could only stay for appetizers before having to dash off for dinner with her buddies, but it was good to see her even for a few minutes and say goodbye in the Unos entryway. Not exactly the closing scene of Casablanca, but we didn’t have much to work with either.

* Okay, okay, I only found one shirt, and the right size of a second shirt that she only could find in a 17 inch neck. Still, I felt like a champion.
** Note – the Pizzeria Uno in downtown Chicago is not affiliated with any of the craptastic TGIFridays-of-Pizza franchises scattered around the country. They get their name from the original one downtown, but that’s the extent of their relationship. The downtown Unos is much better pizza.

Comments

Jay Noel said…
Sounds like you need to bring in an electrician. It also sounds expensive.

We have an Uno's pizza here...and they say it's Chicago-style pizza. It's really very good.
grrrbear said…
For what it's worth, I got a good referral from a friend of mine who used to live in the neighborhood and he's coming in tomorrow at 10:30. No doubt he will find the secret "reset" button, push it once, and proceed to charge me $400 for the service.

Oh well, at least I get an excuse to take a half-day and sleep in tomorrow.
grrrbear said…
And Phoenix, tell me more - does it take an hour to cook their "Chicago style" pizza?

Anything less than that and you're only getting a simulacrum of the real thing.
kippur said…
Screw the Amish, try this:

Go around your entire house(Garage included) and look for the plug-ins that have the little black and red reset buttons. They are called GFI outlets. You can usually find them in bathrooms or places that like to get wet. If you find one, push the reset button. There may be one that is tied to the same line that your bedrooms are on and it's keeping the magical electric juice from getting there. Might save you a couple hundred, and you can tell your boss that you had an electrician do it so you can still sleep in. Better yet, if you fix it, you should pay yourself $400. Plus a small consultation fee to me of coarse.
grrrbear said…
Yeah, already tried that one buddy. You know what's scary? All *my* GFCI's are just as beige as the rest of the face plates.

They're *stealth* GFCI's...
kippur said…
Most likely a new design put out by the electiricians union.
KC said…
Wish I could see Tartuffe! Did you like the production? Were there any tiny trained dogs on stage?
Anonymous said…
Actually, this is not correct. The Pizzeria Uno in downtown Chicago is owned by the same company that runs the Uno Chicago Grill restaurants all around the country, and all Uno Chicago Grills serve the same, world-famous deep dish pizza. I'm Aaron Spencer, and I worked with Uno founder Ike Sewell to perfect his signature dish and take it to pizza lovers nationwide. Of course, our menu at Uno Chicago Grill now goes far beyond just pizza - we invite you to give us a try!