Pay as you Go gas service? What??

It's been an interesting day. We got up this morning and got ready for church. We were even on time. This does not happen too often (that we are on time, that is). We even did a load of laundry before we left. After church we went to ASDA to get some groceries, and we decided to pick up a roast. It's sunday. People should have a roast on sunday. We bought a nice little roast and brought it home in anticipation of a delicious meal. When we got home we realized that we did not have a roasting pan. That's ok. Ever the ingenious and resourceful people we are, we scoured through the cupboards and found the perfect substitute. A round cake pan. Perfect. Just don't push on the bottom or it will come out. Still no problem, we will just line it with aluminum foil. Wonderful. Roast went in without a hitch. I didn't even rip the foil. Onions around the outside, water in the bottom. Beautiful. Into the gas oven it goes for, we figured, about four hours. No problem. Lots of time to cook it and eat it before we were due to meet John and Wynne online. At about 4pm I sniffed the air and realized I could no longer smell meat cooking. I panicked slightly and went to check on the roast. Turned out that the flame had gone out. Ok, no problem, I'll just relight the oven and continue on the process. No go. I thought, ok, maybe it is just the oven isn't supposed to be on so long and there is a safety switch that kicks in to prevent a gas leak. Understandable. Not exactly. Nothing worked. Not the stove, not the hot water heater, nothing. Full blown panic set in. Not only do we have a half cooked roast in the oven, but we also have no hot water and no other source of cooking our food. We called the head hancho at TimePlan. No answer. We called the 'emergency' number for Accomodations Solutions. No answer. We left a few choicely worded voice messages on both phones for someone to call us back. Nothing. We learned from the last 'emergency' situation, and were not about to call in outside help. Ryan and I made a quick decision to knock on the neighbours door and ask them for help. Well, technically we asked their oven for help. They were kind and generous enough to let us stick our sad little cake pan roast into their oven for an hour or so. They were also very distraught about our situation and had no advice. Oh, sorry, before we went to the neighbour we called the landlady who we are not supposed to have any contact with. She told us what the problem was. Turns out we are hooked up to a "pay-as-you-go" gas system. There is a key (about the size and shape of a credit card) stuck into the front of our gas meter. You top up your card and when it gets to zero pounds credit, your gas is cut off. No one told us this. No one mentioned that we should maybe keep an eye on the level and top it up when it gets low. No one mentioned that we might someday run out of gas and we would be thrown into a huge panic attack. Although, if someone had mentioned that, I probably wouldn't have gone into panic mode. Eventually Bob did call us back (the head hancho guy) and he said we should top up our card (duh). That's all fine and good, except it is sunday night and nothing is open. We did finally find an off licence (a convenience store that sells alcohol) that was open and would top up our card. That was after five other stops and people not being able to help us. And a nice long walk because the buses run sporadically on sundays. Murphy's Law did say that this would happen on a sunday. I hate Murphy.

So, now we are all back up and running. And I guess we can chalk it up to a learning experience. A very frustrating, annoying, maddening learning experience.

Love you all!! (except Murphy, I don't love Murphy. And I don't love TimePlan, or the gas company, or the places that couldn't help us, or Sally from Accomodation Solutions, or British gas for being stupid...but everyone else, I love!!)