Power Outage

We had a little excitement at our house Sunday morning when our power went out at 5:23 am. I know that was the exact time because 1) our alarm clock runs on a battery and was unaffected and 2) every other device in our home made some strange beeping noise when it lost power, resulting in the 3-year-old waking up and needing to be in our bed.

We've had power outages before, usually for no more than an hour. So I was surprised when 7:00 am rolled around and we still didn't have power. No ticking radiators with hot water coming up the pipes to heat our rooms. No Christmas lights or lights of any sort. And most tragic of all, NO cartoons for the kiddies!

So Wayne got some wood from the woodpile and started up a nice cozy fire in the fireplace. The girls amused themselves with playing on the rug with the train set and train house (more on that later), while we amused ourselves by watching them and reading the paper alternately. Surprisingly, the girls actually played NICELY together and didn't fight, which made for even more pleasantness.

But alas, come 9:30 am when the power was still off, my body began to crave my morning caffeine fix. So I bundled up and walked three blocks to the Caribou Coffee at 44th and France, which, miraculously, DID have power. As a matter of fact, the block next to ours had power, but we still didn't. I got a holiday mint mocha for me and a latte for Wayne and traipsed back to the house to find the same cozy scene: much playing and newspaper reading going on as we clustered in the one room in the house that was over 64 degrees.

The power finally came on at 10:00 with a "whoosh" of all the things that were anxiously awaiting power before running: the radio began playing Christmas music, the radiators began ticking, the tree was suddenly alight. And soon we were back to our normal weekend activities: playing on the computer, watching TV, and being otherwise occupied. And it happened just in time too, as by afternoon the temperature started to dip and was -8 by the time I went to bed that night.

But it was a nice little respite from technology.