In the dark...

So, I'm minding my own business, putzing on the computer last night, and zap! there goes the electricity. Erg! I hate when that happens! It always scares the snot out of me cuz I think the computer died or is getting ready to explode or something. Very unnerving.

As it happens, Lew was already upstairs, saving me the trouble of beating feet up to silence the alarm on my now-powerless oxygen concentrator and switching myself over to the emergency O2 tank. 'Course I made my way up pretty soon anyway -- it's just no fun sitting in the dark by myself in front of a dead computer and TV.

After first making sure it wasn't our circuit breakers and then calling the power company (our landline phone has its own power source) to report the outage, we pulled out candles, matches, a small oil lamp, and flashlights and prepared to settle in for a bit.

Lew had noticed the power crew working down the street earlier in the day so he moseyed on out to see if they were still there. Nope, they were gone, but I'm convinced that whatever work they had done earlier created or contributed to the problem we had later. It's just too coincidental.

In the past two/three years, it's happened a lot more often than it should... a couple, three times a year... and the power people always claim the wiring is just getting old, blah, blah, blah. Well, like the underground wiring, these power outages in our section of the development are getting reeeal old too, and I am so NOT amused! There's nothing more frustrating than to be staring out the window in one's own eerily quiet and dark house and seeing the lights in the houses directly across the stinking street merrily twinkling away!! Clearly, there's an unresolved issue under there somewhere while I'm sitting around worrying whether my freezer full of food will survive the latest outage!

So anyway, we decided to play Uno. Not the best choice. Ever try to distinguish the blue cards from the green cards by candlelight? Not easy. Had to keep turning the flashlight on and off. We watched a power truck go by about an hour after we called. We played word games. The kind we play in the car on long trips. Lew walked down the street a couple of times to check out what was happening... there were now about 4 trucks and a back hoe on the scene. Chatted a bit with our next door neighbor, who wasn't thrilled with no heat. Nothing, but nothing works in an all-electric home. No stove to heat up my cold coffee and no heat to warm up my chilly bod as the temps dipped down into the 30s. So, I wrapped a throw around myself. I read a little, but Abe Lincoln I'm not so the reading by candlelight bit grew wearisome and Lew dropped his pen when he dozed off over his crossword puzzle. Darkness affects him that way... he thinks it's time to sleep. ;)

Finally, after almost 5 hours of candlelight adventure (and I use the term very loosely,) we decided the hell with it and went to bed a little after midnight, knowing that when (or if) the power came back on, the TV, computers, heat and a few other odds and ends would still be on... you can't even turn some things off without power!

Somewhere around 2 am, the sights and sounds of electrical civilization returned and Lew went around the house turning things off and crawled back in bed. At 7-ish am (on a Saturday!!) we got a recorded courtesy call from the power company telling us to press 1 if yes, 2 if no, to see if we had power. Wait, you mean YOU don't know if you gave us power or not??

All in all, it was not a good night. I need a nap.