Friday night I'm putting yet another K-cup into my new Keurig (that was the first day; I've tapered off since then) and I see, out of the corner of my eye, a flash of light, like a bulb burning out. And I hear a pop (like a bulb burning out). But none of the bulbs that were lit at that time had stopped working, so I took inventory of that corner of the great room and found nothing. I even checked the circuit breaker box, but everything was in place.

My next thought was that something had exploded outside the sliding glass door, perhaps the bulb in the porch light. But there is no porch light out that door, and there was no indication that lightning had struck, so I went on about my business of drinking way too much coffee and tea in one day and (more or less) forgot about the mystery.

As the evening wore on and it got colder inside the house, I reached for my space heater, which was plugged into an extension cord that was plugged into the wall next to the sliding glass door. And suddenly the heater was no longer plugged into anything, and I noticed the bare end of the extension cord, still plugged into the wall but with nothing between me and all that juice.

Well, that's a little unnerving. I unplugged the cord from the wall and unplugged the heater from the dead plug. It wasn't a surge protector but just an old fashioned extension, one that I've had for so many years that I wouldn't be surprised if I hadn't brought it home from college a thousand years ago. I guess I needed a newer one, but who knew that they could explode and snap in two spontaneously like that? I'm just glad I didn't have it in my hand when that happened.

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In other news left over from last week, now that the interior remodel of Raley's is finished, it has become my favorite supermarket again. I was shopping there last Wednesday, though, when workers came along and blocked the very entrance doors where I'd walked into the store. Then they blocked off the sidewalk between the doors on the other side and the area in the lot where my car was parked. And they drove a truck up onto the sidewalk and started tearing tiles off the roof and tossing them into the back of the truck.

That would have been fun to watch from a distance, I have to admit. It wasn't so much fun to have to push my shopping cart out into traffic to get around it. If they haven't finished the roof job by my next shopping day, I might be looking for another temporary favorite market for a while.