Electrifying

Most of my adventures lately have been powerful experiences. Electrifying. I get a surge of adrenaline just thinking about it. In fact, I light up like a Christmas tree.

Not.

Most of my adventures lately have involved going downstairs to flip the breaker after our power trips offline. And then going back upstairs. And then back downstairs. You see where I'm going with this, don't you? We had this issue last Saturday evening/Sunday morning, and then everything seemed to go back to normal. And then Tuesday when I got back from volunteering at the Red Cross office, the power was out. And then every two minutes after that it tripped off again. Sometimes I wouldn't even make it back upstairs before it tripped. We weren't running the air conditioners, neither of the televisions were on, nothing doing with the computers or any big power users. The only thing we could figure was something to do with the horrible weather - torrential downpour.

The housing office called our landlord, and arranged for him to come out with a maintenance guy to do some trouble-shooting. They were very responsive, but after two hours -of no rain - couldn't figure it out. When Tony got home from work they started trouble-shooting our transformers, of which we have four. After repeatedly unplugging and plugging in the largest transformer, which is downstairs with the entertainment center, which caused the power to trip multiple times, they told us the transformer wasn't working. We were a little skeptical, but at the same time relieved to have an answer. And there did seem to be a direct connection (see what I did there?) even though that transformer had been turned off all afternoon and the power tripped off 3-4 times while it was off. So everybody smiled and shook hands and went their own merry ways.

An hour later, while we were sitting on the couch watching an episode of House, the power tripped.

Arrrrrgh.

It proceeded to turn off again 4 times in the night and twice more in the morning. And then...nothing. And hey, guess what, that transformer was still unplugged! And the only thing we can think is that there must be a ground or short somewhere that is affected by the weather, reducing available power to our house. The handyman was supposed to come back this morning, but I waived him off because we made it the entire night without any issues and because the sun is out today. I highly doubt he'll be able to recreate the problem or do anything different than last time. Considering he didn't find the problem last time, it's unlikely he would find the real issue this time. So...fingers crossed that it was a fluke, I guess? That it stays a dry winter? Or else that we get a couple solid days of rain triggering the power outages and the handyman can come back when it's a more consistent issue.

*sigh*

Yep, real adventures over here.