Cursing the darkness

The power failures continue. Last night as I was up way too late (reading Usenet after coming home from a baseball game -- what was I thinking?), suddenly everything went dark. I decided this was NStar's way of telling me that I should go to bed already. So I did. The power came on before I was finished getting ready for bed (clocks indicate that it was out for about 5 minutes).

This is getting quite annoying.

From what I could see from the windows, all of West St. and West Place lost power, but not Broadway. It's remarkable how much darker it is in the house when there are no streetlights.

Things you think we'd know better than

So we've had this summer house in Gloucester for 25 years now, and every fall we shut it down for the winter. It's become something of a routine.

Perhaps a bit too much so. A couple of weeks ago jwg started to put on his gardening shoes and was puzzled to discover several brazilnuts in one of them. Further exploration found a few more brazilnuts scattered about the kitchen, and an empty plastic bag. We had actually left a flimsy non-ziploc bag of nuts in the kitchen. It's not like we didn't know that mice moved in during the winter/early spring.

Then yesterday, since we'd gotten the water turned on, we also plugged in the main fuse, and I went to take out the pieces of newspaper that were keeping the refrigerator door ajar, and discovered that on one shelf of the refrigerator were 5 small cans of V-8 juice (which had somehow survived), a plastic bottle of Diet Coke (left by a guest -- this had also survived), and a six-pack of glass bottle of quinine water, which had not. There was also scattered mouse shit on this shelf.

We looked at each other and wondered how we could possibly have left this stuff in the refrigerator when we closed up last fall.