Patience is a virtue...

Monday night was a crazy night. Shaun was just finishing up his Economics class for school and his final team project was due by midnight Phoenix time (he's taking online courses through UOP). He was the team leader which meant he had to compile, edit and submit the team paper. This was a huge assignment worth a lot of points.

7 pm. I was helping because I am faster with the computer than he is and I was in the middle of fixing the things he wanted edited when all of a sudden the power went out.... or at least we thought it did. The computer went off along with other things, but the lights were still on but only half strength.

Me: *insert bad word* "I just lost the freaking edited copy".
Shaun: *insert bad word* "I have to have this in by midnight!".

He of course goes into ultimate panic mode which makes me laugh... which makes it worse. I'm a logical person and I automatically go into "plan B" mode when something like this happens. So, I had him run next door to the other farmhouse and see if they were having the same issue or if it was just us. They were, so I called the power company. They knew there was a problem and called it a "brown out" since we had partial power. They said it was widespread but had a crew on the way.

7:30 pm. I wanted to just sit tight for a couple hours to see if it came back on, but Shaun was in 'turbo panic mode'. They couldn't tell us when it would be fixed so to calm him down a bit we decided to go over to work a mile away and use that computer since they have a generator (even though we'd have to re-type certain portions that were saved to our computer). When we arrived we noticed that the generator was not on. Because the power was technically still on the generator didn't kick in. We had to call the maintenance guy because that could cause major problems there since none of the coolers were working. But, their phones were out so we had to drive back home.

Me: "we sure could use a cell phone about now." (still didn't own one and I was irritated at running back and forth when I really just wanted to sit home and wait patiently).

8 pm. Finally got the maintenance guy on the phone at home. He told us we needed to shut the power off to the entire place in order for the generator to work. Our power then went out completely. This should have kicked the generator on so we headed back to work. When we get there, we start walking up the parking lot. They had just moved a lot of dirt and I was looking down to make sure I wouldn't trip when Shaun yells, "SKUNK". The damn thing was 10 feet from me.

Shaun: *insert bad word* "Could anything else go wrong?"
Me: *laughing hysterically at the irony of it all*

So we go around the long way. Generator was still not on and nobody was home at the owners house. We walked around a little bit checking things out when the power finally came back on. So, we headed back home.

8:30 pm. Finally got the computer back on and started again.

Moral of the story... If he had just listened to me we could have avoided the running back and forth in panic mode, avoided the freaking skunk, and instead taken a 1.5 hour long nap. He also would have avoided the bill I racked up buying a cell phone today. Hah! Patience is a virtue.