The live shipment from an online critter supplier (invertebrates: tank cleaning crew) arrived badly packed and frozen and smelling to high heaven.

The company was not only careless, shipping bags of live critters into the north in nothing but a cardboard box with a hand-warmer pack, they wanted pix of the unfortunate deceased before they would issue a refund.

I was annoyed, to say the least.

So I’m back and forth in e-mails with the suppliers on the dead critters, trying, politely to inform them they’re at fault, and no, the fact that the water containing the microlife caused my skimmer to overflow an hour after dosing it in informs me the microlife was also dead. And no, I’m not a novice. I’ve been at this hobby probably longer than this chap has been alive, I’m a hobbyist technical volunteer on one of the sites he pays to advertise on, though I did not reveal that fact, not wishing to use that status to get better treatment than he gives other customers, and I do know dead sea life when I smell it.

Not only that, when trying to empty the skimmer, I bobbled, and poured very vile-smelling ‘death’ skimmate (dark fluid resulting from the foam this device collects from the tank water) onto my good snow boots and my pants leg. Yecccch. This particular aroma is so bad that the human nose continues to smell it for up to 2 days after the smelly object has been removed.

Every time I tried to get to work there was another e-mail with a problem that had to be solved. Business stuff.
I went to the store (in a clean pair of pants) and got my thyroid prescription filled.
An hour after I got that filled, and got home, I get a letter from the doc with a new prescription. That one worked out ok: the prescription I just had filled is what Jane is taking.

There were several other things that blew up in more e-mails.

Heck no, I didn’t want to photograph those dead stinking things. I put them into the ivy bed in the garden. But when Jane found out why I was ticked, here we are out in the dark in our night shirts in 20 degree weather searching the ivy bed for deceased wildlife. We did find them. And freezing does mitigate the smell.

So I sent the required photos to the company. They will refund, and if they do not, though I haven’t told them so—the internet site aforenamed is going to get an advisement one of our advertisers is being a jerk.
Well, at least I didn’t burn dinner. But eating with the persistent smell is not ‘nice’.

Nothing on telly.

So we finally head for bed.

I’m just about to fall asleep watching murders on the mystery channel, the only thing that’s on, when, zap! The power goes out.

Not a breaker. The power.

I go down the hall in pitch black and advise Jane, who *is* asleep, and we start looking for the flashlight (which we had used in the dead-critter-location in the ivy) and finding a phone book. All our wireless phones are dead because the base unit has no power. My cell is in the process of charging for the first time…fortunately *that* was past the 5-hour initial do-not-interrupt battery initialization…but it isn’t activated yet…the old cell is deader than a mackerel (thank you, AT&T) and Jane can’t find hers. Fortunately we have a hardwired phone (never give those up!) and we can find one phonebook…never throw out your last one!

Now, in Oklahoma, a clever bot operates with the power company to take your phone number, compute your location, and build a picture of the outage so the OG&E guys can fix it. Not so in Spokane. Ours asks you if it’s a street light and if not, you get in queue and wait a quarter of an hour (at this point I asked Jane for the Scotch) until one elderly-sounding lady gets online to take your information.

Yes, our house is dark, our streetlight is out, and houses behind us and across the avenue are all dark. Across the street, no, they’re fine.

The nice lady informs us a guy took out a power pole (which is why the police have been running down the avenue with lights blazing) and they’ll get it fixed by 5 AM. Well, it’s 1 AM now. So the fish can go 8 hours with no pump. We’re ok.

But at this point we’re frazzled. We got out the oil lamps and had a Scotch and shortbread cookie pity party until past 2 AM. Shu investigated a lamp and nearly singed his whiskers. Sei is still snoozing through it all in my room with the door shut. We decided we’d had enough Scotch to calm down, and headed for bed.

Probably about 3 AM the power came back on.

This morning we have headaches. I wonder why.
We’re hoping for a much nicer Dec 14th.