Cooking in the Dark

I know I promised there would be more, exciting information about how to import pets to the BVI today, but I am afraid I am going to have to postpone that until later in the week, as I want to share with you the difficulties we've been having lately with our utilties.

I've been avoiding writing about the inconsistent nature of our running water since it began a few days before Christmas. Having written so much here already about the questionable quality of our utilities, I didn't want to make it seem like the entirety of our existence on Tortola concerned battles with intermittent electricity and water.

You see, city water has been shut off about every other day since the 21st of December. Ordinarily, we could rely on the cisterns in our building to fill in the gaps of city water service, but our main (largest) cistern has a clogged pipe right now. We have three cisterns, but the two functioning cisterns have seemingly run dry trying to keep up with the demand. As a result, we've been making do with only having water occasionally.

We've had to take a few showers using one-gallon jugs of water that we'd stored for just such an event. Those have been ... refreshing(ly cold). When we hear the toilet tank start to fill at 4:30 in the morning, we both get up to take showers, in case the water cuts out again before the alarm goes off. Essentially, we've been doing our best to simply accept the situation and move on.

Last night, though, we returned from a swim at the beach to find the water still off, and as HB took a jug-shower, I started cooking dinner. I grabbed a gallon of water and filled a pot to boil my pasta, started sauteeing some vegetables, and the power went out. Now, thankfully, I did not need the oven for anything, as it cannot be lit without the electric starter. Also, thankfully, the stove burners can be lit quite easily with matches. So as I stood there in the dark, trying to cook dinner and maintain a semblance of normalcy despite the lack of electricity and water, I decided it was time to write about utilities again.

We lit some candles, and used our battery-operated lamps, and the electricity came back on about 20 minutes later. Dinner was delicious, and we had water again when I left the house this morning. I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that the water will still be on when I get home tonight; otherwise, it's more jug-showers for HB and me.