In the Dark

Last Sunday was a pretty windy day. I had to get up kind of early as far as Sundays go (9:30) in order to play flag football, so afterwards I came home and curled up on the couch to resume sleeping. [During this nap time... the Boy usually cleans the house so it looks nice when I wake up - isn't that nice!] My Sunday nap was interrupted, however, by a loud "POW" noise and then a weird little "Peeeouw" sound.... as the TV went dead. The power had gone out.

Now, to be honest, the power begins to flicker in Richmond if it even looks like rain, so I wasn't really alarmed. After all, it was early in the afternoon and really windy.... I decided to go back to sleep and hope that the electricity would be on again when I woke up.... kind of like how the house would be clean.

No such luck. When I came to, it was beginning to get dark. Luckily, the Boy was working hard and had built a lovely fire to keep me warm. He really is handy to have around!

Observation: Have you ever noticed that when the power goes out you can't keep from flicking the light switch to the on position when you walk into a room, even though you have a flashlight in your other hand because the lights won't work? I always feel dumb as soon as I hit the switch.

Back to the story.... After much deliberation we drove to the Walmart and cleaned out the candle section. The Boy lit all the candles and then the house looked quite cozy. One problem with candles is that it is really easy to catch things on fire. [Like your Sorority House for instance... oops!] I was pretty worried that the Keep was going to catch his fluffy tail on fire. The other problem is that candles do not really provide enough light to read by... especially if you happen to be reading law books... so I had to give that up pretty quickly. Darn. Life became painfully boring without TV or the Internet to distract me... I looked through the giant stack of wedding magazines my friend Katie gave me and watched half of a movie on the computer before the battery died. Then, I gave up on Sunday and went to sleep again.

Monday came and went and still no power... though to the power company's credit, they sent a whole army of "power people" to fix the problem. It was hard to drive down the street because there were so many power trucks. I learned that three houses down a giant tree had fallen and taken out both the power lines and a transformer. [Evidently that was the big "POW."] The "power people" had to go into our backyard to run a new line, and not realizing that they were back there (because it was dark), I let Keeper out to do his thing, at which point he was nearly electrocuted. Poor guy.

The worst part was that the people across the street from us had power. They were warm and happy, watching their reality TV shows, cooking yummy things and taking warm showers while we sat grumpily in our cold dark house staring jealously across the street. Needless to say, we ultimately decided to go to a hotel for the night because you can only go so long without taking a shower and we were well past that point.

Apparently, the power finally came on again in the wee hours of the morning. I know this because the power company was nice enough to call the Boy's cell phone and wake us up to tell us this wonderful news. When daylight came, we trekked home. Sure enough... the power has now returned but the hard-working "power people" managed to cut our cable and internet lines in the process. Great.