The Electricity Mystery

I'm definitely a girl who likes a good mystery story.  Agatha Christie, A.A. Milne, and Dorothy Sayers (!!!) make me a happy camper.  (Yes, I cried at the end of Busman's Honeymoon.)  But, I am discovering that I am not so fond of mysteries when they occur in my own home.

It was a dark and stormy night....

Well, not really.  It was a normal evening.  We were sitting at the dining room table, eating something crockpot-y, when the kitchen lights flickered and went out.  We had been using a number of appliances, so we figured that the breaker had flipped.  Downstairs we trotted, flipped the kitchen breakers back and forth and went back upstairs.  No success.  This went on for about twenty minutes, with "is it working yet?" and "okay, I'm doing the stove one now" and similar hallooing.  In frustration, I turned the knobs on our electric stove, just to see if maybe it would come on.  Lo and behold, it did.  And so did all of the kitchen lights, the coffee pot, and the rice cooker.  Problem solved.

But not really.  The next morning, as we were up and about making breakfast...poof!  There went the lights again.  This time we noticed that when the lights in the kitchen went out, so did the lights in the bathroom.  And the breaker hadn't budged from its normal position.  When we turned on the stove burner, all returned to normal.  I was getting pretty creeped out.  I mean, we're dealing with electricity here.  We called the landlord and he said that he would try to come by and figure out what was going on.

Three weeks later....

The landlord came on Monday checked some stuff, said he had no clue, and told us to call when it happened again.  Now we know that when the lights go out in the kitchen, electricity no longer goes to the bathroom, our bedroom outlets, the internet router, and the furnace thermostat.  The loss of power happens totally randomly: we can be busily cooking, or sitting on the couch, or sleeping away (I know it goes out in the middle of the night because our "white noise" fan goes off...and then I'm no longer asleep).  As I type this at 8am, the lights have already gone out four times.  Flick of the burner knob and all returns to normal.

I could make up a ghost story if I could manage to keep a straight face when I told it.  I think I just need a Lord Peter (but maybe Bunter would be better in the long run).