Crazy electrical problems hamper school work

Wednesdays and Fridays are the days we push the most with school work. They are days when we don't have commitments outside of the house and we can spend more time with history and supplementary readings and activities and crafts.

Today (Wednesday) was a bit of a bust.

We had an odd power problem on Saturday. Lights and appliances and computers in different rooms through the house flickered at the same time. The first time it happened was when the dish washer was changing cycles and was drawing more power. When I turned it off, the flickering vanished. But it happened again Saturday night when the printer cycled to warm up. And we're not talking about the little dimming sort of flicker. We're talking about powering all the way down and up and down and up, complete with the sounds of power being cut and restored. Nothing in the living room was troubled, but in the kitchen the dishwasher, the lights and two outlets on the north wall were affected (thank goodness the refrigerator isn't on that wall). But the rest of the house was mostly dead. No lights in any of the rooms. Maybe one outlet per room worked. Oh, and the heater didn't work. Weird.

It took 2 days to get fixed, mostly because the electrician couldn't make it to us on the first day. But he made it down today. One of the two wires coming to us from the street had melted the fitting that connected it to our house, so we were getting half the power we were supposed to get, and what power was coming in was only feeding some circuits. Again, weird.

But anyway, while we were waiting (and freezing ... okay, not quite - the house never dipped below 59 and was generally at 61) we tried to do a few pages. We got through phonics and math and handwriting. I asked a few questions about the history lesson we read the day before (Sayer *asked* me to read history to her!), but she wasn't able to answer, so we re-read the lesson 3 more times ...

Here's hoping that the rest of the week quiets down!