Why the electricity/cable/phone, etc. goes out

It might be something like this:

Oops. Truck knocks down electric pole into the street, taking electric and phone cables with it.

Next door, you can see how the cables have all been pulled down from the knocked-over pole.

Apparently, a truck took a corner too fast yesterday morning in my neighborhood and knocked over an electrical pole. I had been out most of the morning at my son's playgroup, where we went to the Santa Ana Conservation Area for a picnic (perfect weather, great day, Chris brought Doritos and Hershey Kisses, and really what more do you need in life?). If you haven't been to the Santa Ana Conservation Area, you might stop over some day for something nice to do outside. They used to have more animals there, but they still have a few deer, some peccary babies (I got to pet one on the snout -- so cute!), and a farm with lots of geese, ducks, chickens, turkeys, sheep, and goats for the kids to bother. I don't know what happened to the monkeys (there were capuchins there at one point), and apparently they do still have jaguars because a guide will take you to see them on the weekends. Mostly, though, it's just a nice little spot for a picnic, as there are barbecue grills and picnic tables, which are actually really clean. Not so much the public bathrooms, however...

But I digress. Back to not having electricity. As we pulled up to the driveway, I saw a real mess all over the street, wires laying all over the place for a good couple hundred meters, an electric pole lying halfway in the middle of the road... Oh no. This was one of those days I really needed to finish up some projects. But what are you going to do? This is part of life in Costa Rica. Sometimes you just have to roll with it. The electricity finally came back on at 9:30 p.m., by which point, of course, I was too tired to do any work whatsoever.

So this morning I got up nice and early, thinking I'd get some time on the computer before my boys got up, and what do you know, the internet was out. [insert grumbling obscenities here] There are still CNFL and ICE trucks out front, working on the new pole and new connections, so I wondered if they might have disconnected something. But no, a call to Cable Tica and we learned that a different truck had hit a different pole over in Santa Ana, and cable and internet were out in this area most of the morning. It's back now. :-)

One of the ICE guys came to the front gate this morning asking me what our house phone number was, because they had to replace the phone cables that were damaged. We don't have a house phone number, as someone let it expire before we even moved in here. Esposo asked the guy if they could just replace the cable anyway, as we're planning on getting the phone hooked back up if we can ever connect with the landlord about it (who is over in Europe somewhere), but no, he just removed the old cable and didn't put up a new one. Great. I wonder how difficult/time consuming it is going to be to get new cable up there when we finally do get our phone line hooked back up.

People often ask me how I like living here. My usual response is "Fine, I like it for the most part." These yesterday and today parts, however, are the parts I don't really care for so much.