Ready for ANYTHING

Last night I had dinner on and was just settling down to a spot of study. I was just observing to myself that I'm beginning to smell like baby (The Neff has a fondness for slobbering on my shoulder) when **POOF** the power went out. 

In that precise moment, sitting in the pitch dark, I realised that I had neglected to store a torch in the home office. To get to the house, I have to go through the home gym, which in the dark, is basically a minefield of equipment and hard metal things that you don't want to trip over or walk into. So, I waited for rescue. Eventually The Programmer missed me and mounted a search and rescue mission with the dolphin torch - it can light a whole room quite adequately.

After determining that a large section of the city was powerless, we broke out the earthquake supplies and had a relaxing and quiet candle-lit dinner. I only had my phone handy and it does not handle low-light very well, hence grainy piccies.

Certain young people had never experienced a power outage before.  Miss J was completely perplexed that it could even happen or that there had once been a world without electricity.  She was most upset about the TV being off and an inability to access her favourite internet games.  Luckily (?) we could improvise some musical entertainment with my ipod and her Hello Kitty speakers... which really can't be called 'speakers'. Maybe 'squeakers' would be more accurate. Oh, the pain.

The power was out for about two hours, with a burst of 'power on' somewhere in the middle that lasted just long enough for me to get stuck in the office without a torch again.

I actually enjoyed the restfulness of it all. Sometimes life seems so 'in your face' with noise and images and artificially extended daylight hours.  Dinner bubbling over the fire, wine and actual human conversation suits me just fine. I'd like that for a couple of hours every night.  The rest of the time, I enjoy my hot water and ability to blog random thoughts to the world.