Sin luz or How to deal without power for two days, part I

On Monday, the wall plugs in my house started exploding.  Sounds kinda cool, you know, except the part where the power strip your laptop is plugged into starts to BANG! POP! WHIZZZZZZ!, sparking and sending up plumes of electronic circuitry, which you then proceed to breathe in and cough up later, pretending to be a dragon, but I digress.

No sooner than I’d been able to unplug my laptop charger from the now-defunct power strip, I heard a BANG! POP! WHIZZZZ! from upstairs.  I freaked out.  No joke.  I was home alone, and things were beginning to EXPLODE.  It was frightening. 

De todos modos, I ran upstairs to check out what was exploding in the kitchen.  It took me a while to determine the source of the smell, así que the same burnt electric smell that was concentrated in my room was fairly well dispersed throughout the upper floor. Of course, by the time I realized that the microwave and the radio were the sources of the smell, they were goners.  I said a small prayer for them as I unplugged them, then continued my search for popped plugs.

This part of my search was complicated by the fact that while I kept hearing BANG! POP! WHIZZZZ!, I didn’t see any sparks or pulverized circuitry.  I eventually decided to see if the other power strips had been demolished.  I couldn’t think of any reason they could be – they were all turned off (mine was on, and I figured that was why it exploded).  I switched on the power strip for the TV and DVD player; both se aprendieron, so I figured they were okay and switched them off.  I returned to the kitchen to switch on the power strip for the toaster, blender, and small TV/radio and nearly electrocuted myself, srsly.  I flipped the switch and lightning jumped at me from one of the open plugs.  SO SCARY, pero everything worked, so I found a rubber pot-holder and switched it back off.

I went back and unplugged EVERYTHING.  When Dulce came back after the torrential rains, we went through and checked everything again, with no change.  We called up the electric company (right down the street), and we were told someone was already checking it out.  I, of course, had a presentation/paper in Spanish the next day, so I ran out to the printer’s.

Cuando volví, Dulce was outside, on the side of the house closer to la panoramica, talking with a couple of chavos.  The three of them were standing at the far end of the driveway, next to what turned out to be a downed power cable.  A large vehicle of some sort had knocked it down and the combination of almost-connected-but-not wires and the mixing of the 220 and 110 cable made the plugs in the house start exploding.

And, somehow, aunque everything (except the microondas y radio, of course) checked out before, the TV was somehow burned up as well.

We didn’t get power that night, so we spent the night at Dulce’s mother’s house.  So ended day one without power.