The power went off this morning a little after five.

I probably wouldn't have noticed, except that I think the batteries are getting weak on a couple of the smoke alarms, and they chirped a few times.

It woke me from a dream in which I was a child of about eight, one of five students on a spaceship. We'd been learning how to spin star systems out of galaxy gunk, and had just been set down on a world, in a market, for vacation. I was trying to find the little boy with the dirty face that no one liked, because I felt sorry for him and didn't want him to get hurt. (I'm not sure why I thought a kid who could manipulate matter on a scale of stars could get hurt wandering around in a market, but I did.)

Anyway, I woke up and checked the clock only to discover the faceplate was blank. Matt looked at his watch and told me it wasn't even 5:30 yet, and he rolled over and went back to sleep.

I didn't have much luck with that, but it was nice to lounge in bed and snuggle with Matt for a while.

Eventually, Matt got up to make sure the power outage wasn't something dumb, like a tripped circuit breaker. He came back upstairs with our last power bill, which has the number to call to report outages. He started pushing buttons on the phone in response to the automated menus.

He'd been doing this for a bit when the fan started turning. "The power's back," I told him.

He looked at the fan, then shrugged and hung up.

Matt has Amazing Powers.

Penny slept in until nearly 6:30, so we got a bit of a late start today, but it was kind of nice.

I went home an hour early yesterday because Matt had called the AC repair people my mom recommended to us, and they'd said, "We'll be at your house around 3:30."

I got home at about 3:10, and it was a good thing, because the guy was already there.

He spent half an hour fidgeting around in the mechanical closet, then brought me a gadget maybe half the size of my fist. "Timer-delay switch," he told me. "Don't know why they had a timer delay in there; you don't need one. But it was failing, sometimes. That hissing you were hearing? The unit was pumping freon in like it's supposed to, but the switch is what turns on the blowers. I just replaced it with a direct relay switch. You have any more problems with it, you give us a call."

He went out to his truck and came back with an invoice. While I wrote the check, I said, "I appreciate y'all coming out so quick."

"Oh, we almost always get to people the same day they call," he said.

Now, why didn't we call them back in 2003, when I was nine months pregnant and spent a whole freaking week sitting in a house with no AC, waiting desperately for the repair guy to call back?

--Liz