Pews and Fuse

In a roundabout way this is related to yesterday's blip, that will have made no sense to you if you happened to see it...

When I got home yesterday the electricity was out on the plug sockets. I'm not going to whinge about power cuts considering the recent plights of our friends across the water, but even so it was a bit inconvenient!

Confidently I went to the fusebox and pulled the culprit out, unscrewed it to find a fuse the likes of which I'd never seen before and certainly didn't have in the house! If you care, it was like this. I swore once. Then again. And once more for luck. (It rhymed).

The fuses were all labelled (i.e. Upstairs lights, sauna, swimming pool pump... erm....) except for one, so I pulled the blank one out in faint hope that it might have a fuse like this - it did! But it was 20 amp and the cylinder was too small. I thought... tin foil... I thought... might work... I though... fire brigade... I thought... explain that one... I thought... forget it.

Nothing had turned off when I pulled the blank fuse out so I didn't bother plugging it back in but thought I'd waste no more time and get myself to a large DIY store that opens quite late. I pressed the button to open the electric garage door....

.....

...

More swearing occured. (We don't actually have a swimming pool or sauna. If we had enough money to get one, we'd buy something more interesting anyway, but we do have an electric garage door. We rule the Cul-De-Sac.)

The door has a manual release that runs along the roof conveyor, which you can't get to because the car is in the way...

So after more swearing and use of a hooked bungee cord and cowboy skills I didn't know I had, I eventually managed to get the door opened and the car out. And of course the DIY store had never *seen* that type of fuse before. Nor had the other one. They were very polite. They obviously thought I was a mystery shopper who had come to test them with a ridiculous question, and they passed! 10/10 for politeness!

Marvellous.

Back home, hungry, laptop running on empty while I try and source one of these bloody fuses. Then by chance I remembered an electrical retailer near to the office. Checked online and *result*!

So I tidied up and as I plugged back the Empty Fuse referred to earlier, the garage sprang into life. Well at least I'd had some opportunity to use my cowboy skills.

By now it was late, no blip, no bloody blip!!! There was no moon, it was too breezy to blip an EWFB so I did what anyone else would have done. I thought;

"What would a Hedgehog do in this situation?"

And hence my emergency blip.

The laptop was drained (I knew the feeling), so I uploaded the blip, used the remaining battery power to jazz it up, then thought, "What shall I write? What shall I bloody write?" and with seconds to spare, gibberish flowed :o)

The relation to today is that I went through the Cathedral to get to the shop that sold the fuse, and on my way back I got my blip. Tenuous link but it is what it is.

Good job I had presence of mind to buy two of the fuses because the first one I tried was a dud. You'd have heard me swear. In Australia and New Zealand you'd have heard me swear.

I haven't typed this much in ages. Imagine if the power went and I