I went to bed at my usual time last night–11pm. Seems no matter how tired I am or what I do, I cannot fall asleep any sooner. I awoke in the middle of the night thinking, “Oh, wow. I feel so rested. Sun must have slept all night!” Then I looked at the clock. It was 12:37. Weird.

As I was closing my eyes to return to sleep, I saw a large spark akin to lightening and then heard the loud BOOM!!! I knew immediately we had blown a transformer. Sure enough, we had no electricity.

It woke the hubs up (along with the rest of the neighborhood). We commented that there was probably a dead squirrel or rat lying in the street having been blown from the transformer he mistakenly ran across.

Such a BOOM! brings out the neighbors in droves. And when neighbors huddle near our house, Lucy must bark her head off. Which is exactly what happens. So being brave, I send CS to investigate.

He returns some 10 minutes later. “Squirrel?” I ask. “No,” he says. “A raccoon. Three feet long. The neighbor’s son ran right out and saw it walking around in circles, dazed. Now he’s hanging from our oak tree, shaking.” “WHAT? Poor thing! . . . . Go get its picture so I can blog about this!!” I run to the front of the house to see the monster ‘coon and CS returns outside with my camera. The neighbors are lingering, all looking in the direction of our yard. CS isn’t taking any pictures. I tap the window and give him the “what’s up?” shoulder roll. He responds, “It’s gone.” “Well get away from the tree already! He may attack!”

CS returns inside. Apparently the thing had mosied across the street and into another neighbor’s back yard. Thank God he didn’t come in our back yard. CS tells me that apparently there are TWO raccoons residing in our neighborhood. Our next door neighbor told him that the other day she went to put out her trash and saw what she thought was two cats walking between her house and her other neighbor’s house. But then she realized they were raccoons. She told herself then, “I’ll take the trash out later.”

CS and I crawled back to bed. Funny that in the dark, non-a/c air, we can’t sleep even though it is as dark and cool as if the electricity was on. CS calls to report the outage. He miss-dialed the number for the energy company by one number and got a sex hotline. They asked seductively that you enter your credit card number so that you could “put your hard tool into any of their holes.” Ewwww.

A few hours later, the electricity was back on and all was well again in our world.