Power Outage

We lost power last night. A power line was knocked over, so we were without electricity, light, heat, etc. from 6:15 pm to about 12:45 am - 6 1/2 hours. I had already been having a difficult evening, due to Audrey being very fussy and the kids having had too much chocolate (Valentine's candy was on clearance, and of course we bought too much of it), and not being able to find the Olympic figure skating on TV. The power outage almost put me over the emotional edge, and at first I was in a terrible mood! But it ended up making my evening go much better than it had been. Somehow, being without the TV or computer, or any of those modern conveniences (and often time-wasters) improved my mood and calmed me down, and it ended up being a calm, peaceful, quiet evening.

Not having anything in the way of firewood, we lit a fire of coals. It actually did a pretty good job of warming up the living room, though the rest of the house quickly got chilly. Thankfully, it wasn't a terribly cold night last night, so it never really got frigid in the house. It was really peaceful to sit and stare at the flames.


Although, Zaylee and Thomas kept wanting to get closer to the fire than I was comfortable with, of course. Kids will be kids.

We have been very remiss about keeping our flashlights in working order (we have several, and last night all of them were without working batteries) so we lit some candles to help us get around. These candles ended up being my source of entertainment for most of the evening. As they burned smaller and smaller, they formed intricate and beautiful formations which were a lot of fun to photograph. We started off with three tall candles all burning together.


After a while, though, they became three not-so-tall candles all burning together.




Eventually, two of the candles went out, and all that was left was a single flame in a puddle of wax.


When that little flame went out, we replaced it with another tall candle. It too burned lower and lower as time passed, and the power continued to not come back on.




We finally decided to go to bed a little after 11, not before going through the house making sure all the light switches were turned off. I didn't want the lights to suddenly all turn on in the middle of the night should the power come back on! It's a good thing I did make sure the lights were off, as I mentioned before the power did come back on a little before 1 am. I was very grateful to realize when Audrey woke ma a little later that the furnace had kicked on and was heating the house! We all had plenty of blankets, but it's nice to not really need them quite so much.