I Heart Electricity

It has come to my attention recently that I LOVE electricity.

I just love it. I need it. I take it for granted.

And when the power goes out because of a borderline-tornado going on outside, like it did last night, I lose all knowledge of what things in our house run on it.

"Wait...so will the microwave work?"

"We'll still have air conditioning though right?"

"I'm just gonna go online real quick and check the weather to see when......oh.....wait...."

"Oh, well the cable's out but we can still go watch a DVD!"

No, no, no, and no.

NOTHING. WORKS. when there is a power outage. I'm intelligent-ish. I know this. Yet every time it happens, I walk around the house with the flashlight, flipping on switches every time I enter a room, continuously looking at the oven to see what time it is even though the time's not there, trying to turn on fans because it's starting to get balls-hot without the AC, etc.

So last night, once we all (me, Sister, Suz, Steve) got over our initial fury over not having power, we all found ourselves in the kitchen just staring around at each other like retarded zombies. We were so lost without our beloved electricity.

First, Sister and I tried to entertain ourselves by reading the books we're currently in the middle of. For me, Kafka's Metamorphosis. For her, Eat Pray Love. Of course, we were going to have to read by candlelight. So the kitchen scene looked a little something like this.




We tried our best to be entertained by this activity, but after about 30 seconds we were cursing our blackout situation and lamenting about how much it would suck and how quickly we would die if we had been pioneers or colonists or born anytime before 1980.

There needed to be a Plan B, and fast.

But then we had an epiphany...

You definitely didn't need electricity to drink beer, and that's MUCH more fun than reading by candlelight! And we had better get to doing it fast, because soon the refridgerators would all get hot, and subsequently the beer would get hot.

The situation got exponentially better from there. We went to the fridge and discovered the at-home mini keg of Coors Light we had bought a couple days earlier. Eureka!

hooray beer!

We brought it inside, figured out how to open it up, and poured away. Even Steve, a die-hard pinot grigio loyalist, wanted a pint of the good stuff.





Alas, though, we soon found ourselves going a little bit insane again. The situation had improved, and people may or may not have been getting tipsy, but we were jonesin' for some more action.

All this time, our 3 dogs (the doodles) had been trotting around the kitchen from one human to the next, probably wondering why we were all just sitting there and ninja-licking our legs and stuff.

My sister and I looked from our beer cups, to the bowl cabinet, to the bored dogs, and then furtively to each other. We crept down from our perches atop the kitchen counter and filled a little bowl up with some Coors.

We had long suspected our dogs were alcoholics, especially Dixie, so we thought, why not support their habit a little bit to selfishly satiate our own boredom?

They. lapped. it. up. And before any of you crazies run screaming away from your computers to call PETA, we didn't give them THAT much, and we're pretty sure only Dixie got a little buzzed, and we're also pretty sure she loved it anyway. No harm no foul, right?




just a couple of drunk doodles.

We also realized our iTunes would still work until our computers ran out of juice. So we had a few little dance parties and made a few little home music videos on iMovie, which will hopefully never surface in a highly incriminating way sometime in the future.

Circa about 10:30 PM, 3 hours after it started, the blackout ended. The power came back on, and 4 simultaneous personal celebrations could be heard from various parts of the house/kitchen. We were so excited, and although we had a good time drinking beer and getting our dogs drunk, we were also totally cognizant of our pathetic dependence on our computers and TVs for entertainment.

For all you people who grew up in decades that pre-date the 90s, I am impressed you're still with us. I don't know how you did it.

PS. Should you happen to hear a shrieking fit of hysterics later this evening emanating from the vicinity of upstate South Carolina, don't worry. That's just me, flying into a murderous rage over the fact that the Bachelorette is coming on at 8pm and our cable is still out, and I am a Bachelorette addict who hasn't had a fix since last Monday.

Who's fiending? This girl is.

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Why I Will Always Own a GPS

Today started off innocently enough. I woke up at the crack of noon, spooning with a goldendoodle named Ginger. I went downstairs, had strawberry yogurt with M&Ms in it for breakfast (commonly known as YoCrunch), and Stumbledupon for a solid hour and a half or so.

Pretty typical little Monday morning for a gal just recently gone on summer break.

Then my sister and I decided to run a few quick errands.

Or so we thought.

We started at Barnes and Noble, a little slice of personal heaven on earth for me. I got Kafka's Metamorphoses. I've heard the guy turns into a giant cockroach and I am morbidly intrigued, against all of my better judgment. Sister got Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Solid choices, I'd say.

We then went for a quick spot of lunch at Midtown Deli. We both got Club sandwiches. Delicious, toasted-to-perfection, hammy, bacon-y, cheesy layers of absolute club sandwich bliss. Despite the celebration going on in my mouth over this Club sandwich, this errand, like our stop at B&N, was pretty uneventful.

Then we decided it'd be a great idea to go pick up little Stella, who is currently being boarded at a place called Ambassador Animal Hospital. After hardly any deliberation at all, we set off for Ambassador.

One of the first things we came across was a KIA SOUL. The only place I've ever seen a Kia Soul is in that commercial that airs before like every single movie in the previews at the movie theater, where all of the "people" are actually hamsters and they are driving around in Kia Souls, dancing, being ballers, etc.

And you know that song that's like "and you can get with this...or you can get with that...you can get with THIS....or you can get with THAT"? And the "this" in question is the supposedly awesome Kia Soul and the "that" is whatever piece of shit car they are comparing their Kia to? Yeah, the hamsters are all singing that song and it's just generally awesome in every way.


So anyway, we saw one driving down the street and had a Pavlov's dogs-type reaction where we immediately thought of the hamsters and the awesome commercial, and Sister and I started singing that song and dancing like the ghetto hamsters. Needless to say, our little drive to Ambassador Animal Hospital was off to a GOOD start.

My sister didn't know how to get to Ambassador, and we had forgotten my GPS back home in the Tacome-sauce. But I have lived in this town for like 10 years at some point or another in my life, so I was like, "Hey! I can get us there, no problem. We don't need a GPS!"

I gave my sister a series of incredibly round-about cockamamie di-rections and eventually we found ourselves on a street that I thought looked really promising. And then we drove. Down this street. For approximately 25 minutes straight. We just kept on driving. We passed out of Simpsonville and into Greenville, out of Greenville and into Greer, out of Greer and into.....we don't even effing know. The capital city of a country known as Bumblef**k.

We found ourselves driving down Main St. of some little shanty that looked like Time had just up and forgot about it back in 1953. I definitely needed to acknowledge how wrong I had been about my directional skillz, so I did, and told Sister to look for a gas station to stop at and ask for directions to Ambassador Animal Hospital.

I kid you not, it took us a solid 15 more minutes of driving to find something that even resembled a gas station. Do backwoods South Carolina shanty-towns not believe in gas or something? But thankfully we stumbled upon this little gem of an establishment:



Oh joy. The glorious fuel mecca that is Lil' Cricket. The parking lot smelled like body odor and dog poop.

Me to Lil' Cricket Sally: Could you possibly tell us how to get to Wade Hampton Blvd?

Lil' Cricket Sally: Um.....Um....Um...

(she finally gets off the phone call she has continued to engage in despite customers entering her place of work for the first time in probably 16 years)

Lil' Cricket Sally: Umm....yall know where the Ryan's is up the street?

Me: No ma'am, we don't know where we are at all or how we got here.

Lil' Cricket Sally proceeds to run outside and flag down some random-ass lady who was in the parking lot to ask her our question instead. This lady happened to be something of a walking encyclopedia of backwoods, SC middle-of-nowhere towns.

We mentioned Ambassador Animal Hospital, and this random Lil' Cricket patron knew EXACTLY where it was and how to tell us to get there.

We were back in business! We had only been in the car for a short little 45 minutes at this point!

We found Wade Hampton, and we were still in good moods. How could we not be? We were about to see Stellz! Highly esteemed artists like Selena Gomez and Ke$ha were keeping us company on the radio! We were dancin' again....




Before we reached Ambassador, we of course had one more little mishap. We juuuust missed the driveway for the animal hospital, and instead Sister turned in to the one for "The Cotton Bottom Video Games" store instead. I'll let you make your own assumptions about Cotton Bottom video, but suffice it to say, the building had no windows and the guy walking out the front door very accurately personified every single stereotype I could think of for pedophiles.



We hightailed it away from Cotton Bottom and finally reached Ambassador. We had easily turned a 20 minute errand into an hour-long mini road trip. But it was okay, I was so excited to see Stellz!

And then, in true Murphy's Law fashion, the last thing that could've gone wrong.......did.

Ambassador Animal Hospital was CLOSED.



What. the. YUCK. With a name like Ambassador, you should be OPEN even on days when holidays are being observed, DAMN IT.

After everything we had just gone through to get there, this dump of an animal hospital was closed. We had no choice but to turn around and head home, leaving Stellz in this hellhole till tomorrow.



I even got out and rapped on the window, just in case, after the effort to which we had gone. No dice though. Definitely closed.

We headed home, defeated. We decided to purchase 2 things on the way home to make our day better. The first was fireworks (one of those "good idea at the time..." ideas). The second was Four Loko.

The fireworks were a no-go, probably because it's technically not the 4th of July anymore (Ps. Someone should tell that to the awful folks over at Ambassador.) We were able to get our hands on some Four Loko though, so the night shouldn't be a total bust.



**in case you are a superNoob who doesn't know what Four Loko is, it is a hybrid beverage of energy drink, beer, and pure awesomeness.**

We even got a Four Loko for our uber-conservative father, and we fully plan on forcing him to try it with us later.

So cheers, everyone, to the 4th of July weekend (and apparent establishment-closing continuation of the holiday on the 5th), and to the return of my hopefully regular blog posting again.

Postscript: We are going back for poor little Stellz tomorrow, and hopefully this time we won't have to drive through freaking BAT COUNTRY to get there.


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