Let there be LIGHT!

              I’ve spent the last month and a half living in my stepdads house with out electricity or water.  I don’t recall if I explained how this transition happened, but essentially after 5 months of sleeping with Avo Alice I had to draw the line. Not that sharing a bed with her was something completely unacceptable, because I had no problems sharing a bed with her. It was more the extras that came along with sleeping next to an older womn that made it a more trying experience.

             There’s one particular incident where she was taking natural medication to help her regulate her bowl movements. ( She mentioned going an entire month without having one!) She already gets up in the middle of the night to pee in a bucket on the side of the bed. But tag that laxative on to her midnight pee sessions and it ended up being a big mess in the middle of the night.  I wont go into to much detail just because I don’t want to relive it. But it was ugly, and I had to

            My step dad's house has no water, electricity, furniture, appliances, nothing. It’s an empty house. I bought a bed, moved in all I things and called it home. 

            Its by far the best decision I’ve made. I was waitning for my step dad to move, since its his house, but my circumstances were a little more extreme then his and thus created more urgency. He said he was right behind me and would move in soon. All I would do is sleep there and then go back to alices house to shower or eat or hang out.

             As I began working, I began spending less and less time at Avo Alice’s house.  She made it pretty clear that if I want to eat there I have to jump through some hoops. Not that I wasn’t ok with the hoop jumping, it was just that I didn’t have time to do it, which might have been received as me not wanting to do it.  But she is a complex women and is very good at getting what she wants. (Im being vauge here but essentially she wanted me to pay more money for food on top of the money may dad was already paying her. She was using the money we gave her to feed the 6 other people who live there even though we were only eating 1 meal a day). So I bought a little gas burner and began cooking little meals for my self at my house.  

            The only catch is that is are no lights, so cooking with a laturn on my little gas burner began a classic way for me to spend my evenings. Its like camping indoors!  But I guess I made it sound really enticing because several of my friends wanted to come have dinner at my place anyways!  Haha

            With my first paycheck there were a hundred and one things I needed to pay for, but high on the priority list was getting electricity in my house.  I had the electricians come and they said it would be 400 dollars to pay for the cables that would connect my house to the power line that has the most consistant lights. ( Check out my blog entry on Lights to explain why you can be paying for electricity but not always have electricity)

            The price tag was huge! And that didn’t even include labor. I was daunted by the price, so even though I had the money I told them I and would call them when I was ready. 

            I went another 2 weeks without lights. I was already used to it and was just being cheap. But then I woke up one day and thought to my self, why am I living without lights when I could have lights?!

            So today I bit the bullet (as in dished out the cash) to pay for the local utilities company to come and set up the lights at my house.  Its’ rough because

you never know if your getting cheated, which happens a lot!  We did the math together and the price ended up being 300 dollars (so they were playing with me there the 1^st time).

             I was there as they begin the installation but had to go back to work by the time they finished.  When I got home that evening I noticed the little electricity meter had a red light shining, which meant I had lights! I wasn’t expecting to have it so soon because I still needed to finish getting the contract together. I bought a lightbulb and tada! Lights!  

            Having lights is such an amazing feeling!! Now I can read before bed, charge my cellphone and computer, walking around my room with out a flashlight! Being able to do these things now is like a dream come true!  Granted I only have lights in my room, but it feels like the world has been lit!

            I guess its appropriate that I would have a living experience without lights since I’m working for the Solar Power company whose goal is to fix the energy problem here.  I have a sense, to an extent, of how most people live in the dark. I was or I am ecstatic to have electricity, I can only image how everyone else who have spent years living without lights will feel once they have it.