Black out in an American General Life

2008-11-01T18:34:00.000-07:00

A night like any other, my hubby and I were sitting next to each other on our computers having a relaxing Saturday evening.

It started to rain and since it has been around 90 degrees the last few days, we didn't mind. I decided to go upstairs and make sure the rain wasn't coming in the open windows and getting the floor wet. In looking, I saw that the fan in the window was getting wet, so I decided to turn the fan off.

I just put my hand on the knob to turn it off when.....BOOM.....a loud clap of thunder which made me jump out of my shoes, and in the same instant.....POOF.....no electricity and NO COMPUTERS!

The power is out for approximately a mile radius.

What to do???

I made my way downstairs in the dark. That was fun!

We gathered our flashlights and all the candles that we had saved from the blackout of 2003 and sat around in the heat without any fans for a couple of hours hoping that the electricity would come back on.

Who am I kidding, we can't be that lucky?!

We decided it best to go to bed with hopes that the power would be back on by the time we woke up.

9:00am, still no power and NO COMPUTER

What could we have been thinking?! Everyone else in the city was not affected by the power outage except those of us in this mile radius, so why would they worry about us.

This is not good.....no coffee.....we have to have our morning coffee!

Well, we have a lot of those insulated cups that you buy at convenience stores, so we gathered them up and I went off to a store that had power and fresh coffee. The guy working at the local 7-11 was very nice and charged me for 4 refills of coffee, even though one of the cups was 64 ounces or a full pot of coffee!

We usually have coffee and check on all of our stuff on the computer in the morning. Not today! We have coffee, but No Computers!

We decide that we are gonna get our lawn chairs and sit on the porch. What else is there to do? It's gonna be 90 degrees again today, so not much. After all it is Sunday. I got my pen and paper and brought it out with me. We also brought the Sunday paper out to read. We talked about a lot of things and just watched people go by in cars and walking. It was nice.

As a matter of fact, it is noon right now as I am writing this with pen and paper. Of course, you will be reading it when the power comes back on, but I wanted to keep you informed.

12:15pm Starting to worry but decide to relax

What am I gonna do about the food in my refrigerator and freezer? We haven't opened either one of them, we know better. We certainly can not afford to replace all of it. We don't know a lot of people, so we just have to hope that it holds out.

Realizing that there is nothing we can do, we continue our vigil of relaxing on the front porch in our lawn chairs.

3:00 pm Hooray

At 3:00pm, 13 hours later, the power returns!

We have made it through without power and more importantly without our computers!

We also learned that we want to take more time to just sit and relax on the porch and do the little things. Of course, we will still be on our computers, but we will also remember to take time to relax together when it isn't so hot outside, like in the evening.

All was not lost in the 13 hours we spent without power. We found something that we want to take the time to do together more often. We also found out that we make a great team when it comes to difficult situations.

As for the food, upon further examination, I found that most of it ruined. The sun burns will be ok in a few days. The lessons learned will remain.