No Power

Last night at about 11pm, I was sitting up in bed chatting with the wife and all of a sudden there was a loud POP and the room went pitch dark. "That's not good," I said.

The heavy wind gusts had knocked out the power, but interestingly, only for our block. All other streets within sight still had power. So, I went downstairs, grabbed the rechargeable flashlight (which, thankfully, I had just plugged back in a few days earlier), a non-battery shakeable flashlight from the car, and a wind-up travel alarm from the guest room.

I placed a call to the power company to report the outage. The entire process is automated and I really enjoyed that one of the options said, "Press 1 if you heard an explosion."

This morning at about 5:30 I jolted awake when the dartboard in our bedroom, the one we haven't used in a year, turned on and played a couple of notes. I set the clock in our room and turned on the alarm and got a few more minutes of sleep in.

It surprised me how comforted I am by the light hum of electronics and the soft glow of lights throughout the house. It felt a little creepy trying to find my way around in the pitch dark. I also realized that we have entirely too many things on the floor in tripping territory.

Since this story wasn't terribly exciting, there's no real way to end this gracefully, so I'll just share a video of a plastic bag that's been stuck in a tree in our backyard for the last couple of months. Heavy rains and hardcore wind gusts still weren't enough to dislodge it: