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Alle Jahre wieder...

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December 10th, 2018

Current Location:

my studio, waiting for TTT on TV

Current Mood:

 distressed

Current Music:

A Pentatonix Christmas

That´s the title of a German Christmas song, and it fits very well to the situation we have each and every year, after hubby has installed the Christmas lights. Yesterday morning the yearly spectacle had come to happen. Again. At six thirty in the morning electricity went out with a bang. The kitchen went dark. The coffee machine twiddled its thumbs. I helplessly stared into our darkened fridge, pondering where exactly I had put cheese and ham. Hubby came clomping down the stairs, grumbling about the electric company. I opened the shutter and pointed outside. It was raining, no, it was pouring down. And all those sockets hubby had used to plug in the Christmas lighting were out in the rain. Again. Me humming It Never Rains in Southern California did not improve the situation. Hubby harrumphed then pulled out the main plug, pushed the master fuse back into place and did as if nothing had happened, even began to work on a very important word document after breakfast, kind of a last message to his former colleagues (hubby has retired a few days ago, yet he had to formally pass the official duties of a member of the orchestral board to his successor...). Half an hour later the test phase for elictricity got ringed in, hubby pushed in plugs, the fuse tripped, the next string of lights got tested, this one did cooperate... It came down to two culprits which got immediately separated from the rest. Hubby shows no mercy to miscreants which disturb his Sunday rest. Unfortunately the continuous electric blackouts had eliminanted hubby´s well-considered famous last words, because he never activated automatical saving but insisted that saving every quarter-hour was quite fine for him. This day of all days husband dearest was quicker at producing a blackout than his PC was able to save. Hubby was livid now and resorted to drastic measures to get all of the lighting going: he began to drain the sockets by standing in the rain with an umbrella in one hand while wielding a blow-dryer with the other one. Well, we have neighbours who brush the dust off their fence with a feather duster and others who water blast their apple tree when it´s in full bloom, to get rid of moss (and later wonder why there´s no apples in summer), so why not use a hair-dryer on electric sockets, that´s what he must have thought. I finally resigned and picked a book to retreat to the sleeping room, to not be seen for another hour which included two more blackouts and a Christmas tree without lighting, because this one one had gone kaput during hubby´s electric games. So my six metre high Thuja occidentalis Tiny Tim will have no Christmas lights this year, which is kind of sad because come next year I will saw that green monster down that had been half a metre high when I was dumb enough to free it from its pot, where it had (not) grown for at least three years, to plant it in front of our kitchen window, and look what I got! A lot of firewood ten years later, huzzah!
Apopos next year: Hubby has made it clear that he insists to do at least one big journey together with precious daughter mine and me. Tickets to Auckland are already bought, as is a transfer flight to Sidney, so there´s no going back anymore. Date of departure: January 19th. Coming back from Sidney: February 28th. I only hope that number one, two and four will be ready to feed the cats and clean the cat toilets, or Namo and Vaire will have quite a series of fits. They are old cats now, and they are getting picky. We have a very nice neighbour who loves our cats and will gladly come and take care of them, unfortunately she is not loved back by the cats, which might end in disaster. So wish us luck, please! Much as I love New Zealand, I love my cats more, and they are not as fit and healthy as they had been when I did my previous trip to the other side of the world!