This has a perfectly logical explanation

Well, the socket halfway up the wall has none that we know of. But the crockpot on the box on the chair in the living room does.

We have a circuit problem. In the first two weeks of school we blew the fuse... five times maybe? That I remember. And once it was twice in three hours.

And, since we definitely don't have the key to the fuse box, we had to call either public safety or physical plant, shamefaced like little puppy dogs who had just peed in the corner again. "Really, I thought that unplugging the lamp would be enough!"

All we had to do was turn on more than one warming appliance or use more than one lamp and then poof! Gone.

At least one time the public safety guy was cute. After that I felt like boiling water, toasting bread, and making bread in the machine under the light of three lamps might become a a habit. Don't worry, I wasn't that stupid before!

But anyway, now we have a general policy of turning on only one or two appliances in the kitchen at a time.

Which is why when my garlic brown sugar chicken needed to sit in the crockpot for six hours, and I thought it likely that we'd probably need to use more than one other appliance in the kitchen, and turn on the lights and leave the refrigerator running at the same time, I had to get creative.

So I trucked the crockpot into the living room.

And dealt with the mysterious floating outlets.

Aren't you proud of me, all thinking ahead and problem solvey?

I've got ground to make up, because probably more than half of the blown fuses were my fault. Heh.

Now if only the chicken comes out well...