Tuesday Troubles

I know….most of you think that we are just out here, laying around on the beach, learning to eat sushi and making appointments to go to the tanning booths for that California spray on tan, but let me just give you a quick little update on my day. It began just like all the rest, got Randy off to work, got my first call of the day from Jodi, got some things to take back to the store (which is about 18 miles away. Thought, well it is beautiful out today, maybe I will just take a book to read and stop somewhere to have a quick lunch before heading back home. As I was headed out the door, I thought to myself, “self, maybe you should just eat a quick Lean Cuisine so you won’t spend any more money, or use up my calorie count on fast food. So I got out the meal of choice and popped it in the microwave only to discover that it wouldn’t turn on, in fact, as I looked around, all the little cute lights that I leave on, weren’t on, so I quickly discovered that the electricity was off. I thought to myself, “oh, I bet it is just off because someone is working on something in the neighborhood,” so I decided to just go ahead and leave and run errands, thinking that by the time I got home in a few hours, it would surely be on. Well, I get home and still no electricity. Checking with the neighbors only
to find out that they had electricity, I started to panic. Was I suppose to be paying for the electricity? Since we have never rented before,I didn’t know if I was suppose to have it switched over into our name, or what, so I called Randy and he told me to check the fuse box in the hall. Checked it and it was fine. Then I called the man who is like the “repairman” for these condo’s and he told me to go out and look at the main fuse to see if maybe it had blown a fuse for our place. I had to go find a neighbor who knew where it was, and we discovered that indeed, there was a tag on it from the City of Pasadena saying that they had turned it off because they were owed $138.08. It is now 3:00 and I begin to think that we might not have lights tonight and get excited about the possibility of getting to go out for dinner, since we have all electric kitchen. After a few phone calls to the landlord, it seems that they thought that the HOA fees included the electric and gas and water and that in our contract, it states that they will pay for everything. So they make a call and assure us that it will be turned on by 6:00 tonight. In the meantime, because I have been on the phone trying to call so many people, my phone has no charge so I go to the garage, plug in my phone and sit in my car to read to let my phone charge for about 30 mins. One of the neighbors see me sitting in the car and ask me if everything is ok? I tell him what is going on and he tells me to let him bring my phone into his house and they will charge it for me so I don’t have to sit in my car. We get our electricity around 5:00 so I didn’t get dinner out, we had sandwiches. It was just so nice to know that people are still in the habit of helping and the neighbors who we have here are so sweet. The landlord even sent us over a gift certificate to
apologize for our inconvenience. The sweet neighbors who live under us invited us to come over tonight to watch TV if we still didn’t have the lights on. These California people are very hospitable, almost made me feel like I was back in the South again, except they didn’t offer us a glass of sweet tea or pie. Maybe they were in a hurry to hit the tanning parlor or go out for sushi.