I tend to go a little nuts in emergency situations. I pretty much have zero chance of staying calm if I’m scared or nervous. And that’s when I’m fully awake and functioning, and I still lose my marbles. It’s embarrassing and ridiculous and me. Totally me.
So if you add in a scary situation that happens while I’m sleeping, well… all bets are off!
Let’s backtrack now about 7 years. We had just moved into our current house that had sat empty for 5 years before we bought it. I was already not sleeping the best because of the layout of the house. We had moved from a ranch house where our bedroom was right across the hall from the kids. Now in our new house, we were downstairs off the kitchen while the kids’ bedrooms were upstairs off the loft. In my wacky mind, I was already mildly freaking out about this and nothing had even happened!
So sleep was hit or miss anyways. On about our 5th night in the new house, I was actually sleeping at about 3:00 a.m. when all of the sudden our bedroom light turned on and the ceiling fan started spinning at mach speed. I mean, it was nuts. My husband and I both shot straight up in bed and I thought for sure that ceiling fan was going to fly off and hit a wall. I’ve never seen a fan move so fast! Then we heard it.
The garage door was going up. That was when my freak-out started. I started screaming and ran into the bathroom to brush my hair.
Yep, I thought somebody was breaking into my house, and forget the fact that I wasn’t wearing pants… I was just worried that my hair was a mess. While I screamed.
My husband grabbed something. I honestly have no idea what because I was much too busy probably brushing my teeth or something. He had something and kept telling me to stop screaming while he threw a pair of pants at me and headed for the garage. I remember thinking “this darn house with the stupid layout and now the kids are upstairs”! So I started heading through the house to get to them when I reached the living room and that’s when I saw that the sunroom light was on!
What the holy heck, people?? The garage door is still going up and down, the fan is still ready to spin off it’s anchor and now the sunroom light is blazing at the other end of the house??
Gah, what a crap night that was! Nobody was anywhere. Eventually there was nothing to do but go back to sleep… after I had woken up the whole house. But at least I had fresh breath and pretty hair, right??
So the next morning we called our electrician friend who tested every outlet in the entire house until he got to the VERY LAST outlet where he found the issue. In a small crawl space-like storage room over the garage, there is a single outlet. That outlet was never wired correctly. After the house sat empty for 5 years, we moved in and had the gall to turn on the central air and somehow that made the wires in this outlet expand and contract enough over the change in temperature that it caused the whole mess that night! Some kind of technical terms about it being in an unheated storage room, and then it got cold by 3:00 a.m. and more gibberish.
All I know is that is how we discovered that the previous owners had that specific outlet, the sunroom, garage and just the ceiling fixture in our bedroom on one circuit! That is the most bizarre circuit in the history of circuits (I bet there’s a list somewhere about bizarre circuits)! And it scared the bejeebers out of me on that one frantic night!
Moral of the story: Always thank your electrician! They’re good people who help us sleep better at night!
Moral 1.2 of the story: Cupcakes are always welcome! These weren’t actually for the electrician in my “horror” story, but I’m sure he would appreciate them too! Especially at 3:00 a.m.! These were super simple to make with fondant. Just keep rolling and molding like you would playdough until you get your shapes! Ba da bing, ba da bam… that’s the extent of my tutorial today! : )