Fresh off of reading an excellent book about infrastructure, we got a nice reminder of what we take for granted!
Friday night, the lights in Nick’s room wouldn’t turn on. The circuit breaker had tripped and would immediately re-trip when we toggled it. We tried unplugging everything in Nick’s room to no avail. So we figured the problem was the circuit breaker itself and, being busy (this weekend we went to a total of five baseball games and one birthday party!) scheduled someone to come out on Monday to replace it. In the meantime, Nick slept in our room, which actually went surprisingly well given past experiences!
Monday, the electrician (from Klock Electric, would recommend!) came out, but replacing the breaker itself didn’t help. So he went through the room, and made sure everything was unplugged, then said sometimes this happens if there’s a short in the outlet instead. So he disassembled all the outlets in Nick’s room, but they all looked fine.
Eventually I remembered that there’s an outlet right on the outside of Nick’s room, and the electrician said that usually those are on an outside circuit, but he could check – if it was just punched through the wall they might beo n the same one. I stayed in Nick’s room to point to where the outlet on the inside was, and through the window he said the outside one was lined up with it. So he disassembled it, and I heard a yelp. I quickly asked if he was OK. Turns out: there were lizards inside the outlet that were causing the short! He took a picture to show the folks back at the office, removed the lizards, and everything was working again.
Monday night as we were putting the kids to bed the power went out. This seemed like an extraordinary coincidence, but that’s all it was – the whole neighborhood was out for a few hours. The kids handled it pretty well (they get very nervous when the power goes out!) and we read and played some board games by the light of my laptop with a blank Notepad open. The power came back around 9 PM, so we didn’t lose the stuff in the fridge, but our internet didn’t came back. I tried some stuff to fix it (rebooting the router a few times, going through the AT&T support steps) but nothing worked and it was time for bed.
In the morning, our internet still wasn’t working. As we were leaving for school, the garage door wouldn’t open! Luckily David remembered how to use the manual release so we opened it that way. I was pretty annoyed at the general brokenness of stuff in our house.
After we dropped off the kids, we came home, and David remembered that our garage door was actually just plugged into a GFCI outlet in the garage, and so hit the Reset button on it, and that fixed the problem! Then we came back inside and the AT&T router had decided to start working again.
So now everything is working and I would appreciate a few days before the next thing breaks!