let there be light

My friend, fellow teacher, and semi-pro expat named Tim loaned me his electrical transformers for our adventure abroad. I had no real need for the transformers until the other night when I wanted better light for reading. We did bring a few of our own lamps with the intention of trying to rewire them, but had never gotten around to the task. So I plugged in the transformer, hooked up the light, then got distracted and walked out of the room. Several minutes later I smelled a weird burning smell and followed it into our bedroom where I had hooked up the light and transformer. I could barely get into the room with all the smoke and the horrible smell that permeated the air. I quickly unplugged everything and soon learned that there was no longer power coming from the wall outlet. Now back home..... we would simply mess with the breaker box and all would be fine... but nothing is simple anymore.....

Time to take out the échelle (remember that word from the orange duct tape episode?) climb up to the electrical box high on the wall and see what the matter is. .... It took Jeff and Paul quite a while to figure out that they had no idea how to fix the problem. The solution..... send mom to the store to buy a bunch of new fuses and hope that fixes the problem. It took a while before I could remember to bring the list of fuse types with me when I was at the appropriate kind of store. In the meantime, since there was no power in our bedroom and also in the adjoining bedroom, which is Kate's, we had an elaborate system of extension cords "daisy chained" together to provide electricity to the rooms. I was tired of tripping over all the cords and decided to make a special trip to the store to get the fuses. After standing in front of the fuse aisle for probably half and hour reading all the fine print and not understandiing much of it, I finally bought fuses. Paul tried to change them last night without much luck getting the power to work.

"Let there be light..... please!"
PAT!! HELP!!! catch the next flight here!