Electricity

Dreaming of sleep, and hoping it will be in my bed tonight and not in a hotel. I've migrated from the coffee shop that closes at 9pm to the coffee shop that closes at 11 pm (that gives me 1 hour and 11 minutes for the situation to resolve itself). The beauty of the house I live in are the roll-down metal security gates. At night when we sleep we are uber secure (kind of bizzarely excessive I think). a few weeks ago during one of the somewhat infrequent power outages, we realized that if the gates were down, we wouldn't be able to get out of the house. Fire, earthquakes, medical emergency--we could think of a few reasons why this might spell problem. So we devised a plan--leaving the roll-down gate that opens to our neighbors little shared courtyard open all the time, as there is another metal padlocked gate (to which we have a key) barring entrance to that courtyard from the alley. For some reason this plan was never put into action. As it happens, today on my way home from the 9pm coffee shop, as I walked down the alley home most of the neighborhood blacked out. Foiled. On this rare occasion no one else was home. The husband-half of the couple who live in the house is in the states for work, the wife and the visiting daughter were just out at the night market in downtown Hanoi (they've been home tried the door, called me and are now coming to meet me), and my roommate I haven't heard from--but she was at a friend's house down the road.
Barring the fact that most of the powerlines here look like woven sphagetti (the other day after a windstorm I was practically limboing under falling wires on my way down the steps from the street to my alley) this problem could be resolved if people used less power. At the last power outage (about a week ago) we consulted the neighbors and discovered that our house is one of the houses on our block that's on the "bad power connection system," so anytime someone on that system (or the combined input of all of us) runs too many air conditioning units at once, or too many of our on demand hot water heaters, the power is--apparently--likely to go out. This should certainly make us all more conscious of energy use, but with the hottest part of summer approaching, I anticipate this will be regular occurrence. I think we might be getting a generator.