Electricity good

Had our first problem with the house today--power outage. The electric company had to do some emergency work on a transformer that took out our entire block. W. went to go play with the circuit breaker in the basement and when he tried to turn the main switch back on, it refused to stay in the "on" position. Some guy at Home Depot told us that some circuit breakers require electricity to be running through it before it will go back on. So we wait...and we wait...and we wait...and lo and behold, all our neighbors seem to have power now, but our circuit still refuses to turn back on.

NStar (power company) guy comes out, tells us it's our problem because the circuit breaker is broken and that's not their responsibility. Stupid power guy, we never would have touched the circuit breaker if you idiots hadn't broken fudged up the power in the first place.

Luckily, I had talked W. into getting a homeowner's insurance policy when we bought the house. He and the realtor (who actually bought the policy for us as a closing gift) thought I was crazy for wanting a warranty on a house that's only three years old, but ha! Now we only have to pay an electrician $50 to come and put in a new circuit breaker instead of something like $200-300.

The electrician that stopped by tonight was really nice. He managed to get the circuit breaker to the "on" position again--or else I wouldn't be here blogging about it--but he's going to come back tomorrow when we can get ahold of the right part to replace. As he said, since we're not paying for it anyway might as well replace it so it won't happen again. So, after 10 hours or so without power we finally have lights again. Hallelujah!

The other exciting thing I did today was finally go to the Social Security office to start the whole name-change process. In about three weeks I will have a brand spankin' new card with my new identity on it. Exciting and a little sad all at the same time, but since I waited a year and a half before I did anything I've had more time to get used to the idea of a new name. New home, new name, same old me.