One thing leads to another

Because of the hype surrounding the 2010 Olympics there is a building boom going on here in Vancouver. There are no less than six primarily residential towers ranging from 22 to 60 storeys going up in the three blocks around our building. Where they expect the occupants to come from, why they expect people will move to the city for a two-week event four years away, where these people will find jobs and the money to pay for these apartments, and why they think they will still be here five years from now is a whole different set of issues.

In order to make way for these buildings, several older, largely derelict commercial buildings were demolished. The demolished buildings were home to a fair number of mice and rats. Of course these rodents needed to go somewhere, and with all the construction going on they had limited options. Our building and the handful of other century-old hertiage buildings on our block are now home to the displaced rodents.

For the last couple weeks the cats have been camped out in the bathroom, staring at the wall. We've heard skittering in the old light-well shaft, but thanks to feline vigilance we haven't noticed any indications of mice or rats actually in the apartment so it hasn't been much of an issue.

This morning, however, it has become an issue. Just as my alarm was going off this morning the power cut out. With all the construction around an accidental outage wouldn't be a surprise (like, for example, the one caused by the Pender sinkhole). However the lack of beeping from my UPS was odd. Turns out that the breaker on the circut for the bedrooms, bathrooms, hall outlets, and kitchen lights tripped for no apparent reason.

I reset the breaker and in a matter of seconds it tripped again. I tried resetting it again and it tripped immediately.

This necessitated finding a lamp to put in the kitchen for light, candles in the bathroom, and writing a letter to the superintendants about the short circut - all of which made me half an hour late for work.

Thusly did the 2010 Winter Olympics made me half an hour late for work this morning. Damn you, Olympics.