Failure of the Day: Power

Hey, you know what’s nice? Coming home from vacation and having electricity. At least that’s what I hear. I myself wouldn’t know.

Vacation was swell—although I was seasick for a good bit of it. I somehow managed to forget my one miserable night as a Sea Scout: After about three hours of my first boat trip (a godforsaken overnighter to boot), my body informed me in no uncertain terms that I was in no way seaworthy and there would be no cessation of the vomiting until my legs were back on dry land. Thus endeth my scouting career. Cruise ships are very big boats though, presumably ensuring a much smoother ride. Right? WRONG. Being the delicate orchid I am, I still had to gobble chewable Dramamine in shaky fistfuls.

Much of the trip is a blur of scorching heat and steaks with béarnaise sauce, with a generous sprinkling of slot machines, pedicures, and chocolate cake for good measure. Our night in LA was much the same: Canter’s Deli chopped liver never disappoints, and the Craigslister we met up with came through on the tickets to opening night of Clerks 2 with a Q&A with Kevin Smith afterward. All forms of transportation and connections—buses, trains, ships, taxis, and shuttles—were effortless and almost 100% on time.

And then we got home.

It was 106 in San Jose when we returned, so we cranked up the A/C as soon as we got in, late Saturday afternoon. It lasted for 15 minutes and then was gone, and it would not be fully restored until Tuesday night. We spent the next several days and nights as modern nomads, driving in an air-conditioned car to various restaurants, malls, movie theatres, and hotels—anyplace, really, where it was cool. It was an odd sort of limbo; we wanted only to be home but could barely stand to be there for the few minutes each day it took to throw out all our perishable (perished, really) food and pick up a new pair of underwear.

Whatever went wrong at PG&E also fried our air conditioning system, which had to be replaced completely on Tuesday, and oddly, our telephone/ answering machine thingie. The other two phones in the house still work fine; but the one in the bedroom is dead dead dead.

Have I mentioned that Tuesday was my beloved Chris’s one and only 40th birthday? T’was, and quite a doozy, eh? We made the best of it with a spectacular meal and a remote control Superman that, I'm told (quite frequently in fact), can "soar up to 300 feet."

My legs, for those wondering, are still smooth from the all-but-painless waxing a full 12 days ago. I will almost certainly begin waxing everything under the sun from now on, so pleased am I with Tiffany at La Dolce Vita Day Spa.

We're back home now and most of our junk works again. We bask in the normalcy. We relish the routine. How are we? Happy as motherfucking clams, you betcha.