I got the kids into bed and asleep by 7:50pm, so I had just enough time to quickly cook some pasta to go with the sauce. The pasta was just done when the power went off and we were plunged into darkness.
No worries, I had my solar lamp with me in the kitchen. I drained the pasta and my husband Alan and I had a good supper of pasta and homemade sauce.
Not having enough light to read comfortably by, and being pretty tired after the week, we decided to go straight off to bed.
We were fast asleep when the power came back on at 10:30pm, and we only woke up at about 6:30am when the dog needed to be let outside.
When Alan went through the house and opened the kitchen door, he was met by a room full of choking smoke. On the stove was the pot with some leftover pasta in it, now turned into charcoal.
Yup, you guessed it.
When the load shedding started the night before and the kitchen went dark, I forgot to switch off the stove plate. Without that helpful little red light that shows when you have a stove plate on, the stove looked "off" when we went to bed.
The stove had come back on at 10:30pm and had been on the whole night, 8 hours. The pot practically fell apart when Alan tried to take it outside. The kitchen and living room were full of smoke and reeked for days.
It is just quite amazing that the kitchen was not set alight -- I still don't understand how that pasta burned to charcoal in the pot without anything else catching on fire. So we lived to tell the tale, and now we are totally paranoid about making sure that everything is switched off during load shedding!
These articles was written by a reader in response to the Spindel laundry dryer competition.
Want to read more about load shedding disasters? Check these out:
“Load shedding melted my curtains!”
My favourite jewellery box caught fire during load shedding