A Non-Utilitarian Few Days

Avid readers will remember that we’ve had our share of trouble with water and sewage. Well, since Wednesday, there have been a series of “issues” on the utility front.

We haven’t had hot hot water since Wednesday. Sometimes it’s lukewarm, sometimes it’s tepid, sometimes it’s colder than the cold water. But we can manage. If we need to, we can heat up some water on the gas stove to do the dishes. Showers are simply, how shall we say it, refreshing.

So we thought nothing of inviting over one of our translators and her husband for dinner on Thursday. After all, we could slowly do the dishes later. We went to the local supermarket (супермаркет, in Russian) and bought our food for dinner in the morning. We had decided to make ethnic food for our guests: Canadian. So we were making a nice beef stew with a bit of red wine thrown in for flavour, along with mashed potatoes. Our translator even got into the swing of things, because she volunteered to make an apple pie. So our guests arrived and asked if they could wash their hands before dinner. Sure, we said. Feel free to use our bottle of Purell.

The cold water came back at about 7:30 PM, but the hot didn’t come back until about 9:00 PM. And it was red. And it smelled like sulphuric acid had been added to it. A lovely smell permeated our kitchen/living/dining room as we finished our dinner. But all in all, our dinner was a success.

The hot water still hasn’t been hot since then, but at least we have some water.

Yesterday (Friday) at 5:25 PM, the lights went out. We had been warned that in the summer, the electricity can be rationed if their is too much demand caused by air conditioners. But it was only 10 degrees outside, and had been raining all day. That didn’t sound like rationing. It sounded more like a problem with the system, because of the volume of rain. Besides, they wouldn’t ration the power at supper time, would they? The entire neighbourhood was without power. We thought that the repairs would be carried out quickly, given the widespread nature of the blackout. So we cooked our dinner on the gas stove. Why is that exceptional? Because the gas is only on for about half of the time. One week on, one week off. We have an electric hot plate for the gasless days. So we lit some candles and had a romantic dinner with Alexey. We sat in the dark for only 5 hours before the electricity came back on. 5 hours to the exact minute. Hmm. Maybe they did cut off our power deliberately.

You just never know what’s going to happen here.