Electricity Experiments Gone Awry!

So, I offered Jackson the large bag of electrical items that I had gathered up for a Science get-together we were supposed to have at a fellow home-schooler's house, and he was so thrilled to pull out all the batteries, lightbulbs, rubberbands, screws, nuts, bolts, wires, and what-nots.

Jax futzed around with them for quite a while in the kitchen, until finally he came into see me and showed me a plastic covered wire that had a burned end. He shared that he had stuck it into the electrical socket and a blue spark had shot out!
Hmmm......Not good.

So, we went into the kitchen and right away we saw that the socket was black and after I suggested testing the socket, we discovered that it didn't work. John went out to the fuse box to see if it had blown a fuse. No. The socket didn't work...and neither did any of the other sockets in our breakfast nook, including the socket that our fridge plugs into! Agggh!

But, miracle of miracles, the one socket below the phone plug-in was still working.....and if we rotated the fridge sideways, we could plug our fridge into that one.
Of course, it means that our already narrow opening into the breakfast nook has just shrunk about 10". But it beats having to keep our fridge in the middle of our living room!

So, does anyone know of a good (and cheap) electrician?


The front of our fridge looking towards the living room.

The back of the fridge looking toward the front of our house.

The wire that Jackson had used to plug into this socket....and why did he choose to do that?
"Batteries didn't give me enough power, Mama. I needed more power"


I'm raising a little engineer. I know he'll do some amazing things one day. I picture him like a 'mad' scientist one day. Maybe a Rocket Scientist! But hopefully nothing will catch on fire, blow up, or grow sixty legs before then......