Rolling Blackouts

That's right, we're going to suffer from South Africa's overuse of electricity. Monday night was our first planned "load share", so our electricity was cut from 7 p.m. - 11 p.m. I saw "planned" as if we knew it was going to happen. We had no idea. The power has gone out here a number of times, so we just assumed it was some failure at the power station. Nope. It was built into the April load share schedule. There are four more this month, and who knows about the rest of the months I'm here. At least we got a schedule (forwarded from my friend who works for the European Commission), so now we can plan to be in another neighborhood when ours goes dark.

Luckily, I had 80% of my computer battery when the power went out, and Sarah had about 50%. So we watched some crappy TV shows on DVD, and went to sleep at 9 p.m. It was dark, there was no internet, no more computers, and not enough candle light to read. I didn't even bring a flashlight with me.

The next planned outage is Friday night from 6:45 pm - 9:15 pm, though I suspect it'll be longer like this last one. I guess we'll just go out to dinner or something.