Ah, no power.

I kind of like it. Kind of.

The folks were in town (mine) and we lost power on Saturday at some time. We already had a fire going, so we pretty much didn’t react at all. Except for Stacey, who had some new dessert cooking in the crockpot, which was eventually discarded.

We basically sat around the house in the candle-lit dimness. My father and I went out foraging in the backyard for firewood, as our meager Atlanta-level supply was dwindling fairly quickly. We also discovered that Olive Oil works pretty well in a pinch, if you’ve got a lack of kindling. I haven’t done the official comparison, but I’m guessing it’s cheaper per-fire-start than those fire-lighter logs you buy in the store. But small, scrap sticks are best (i.e. free).

Roan didn’t seem to mind the cold at all, except he couldn’t get his daily fix of RiverDance and The Muppet Show. There was plenty of play-dough and books, none of which take power. Except for the books that light up and play music, which were just fine with their own batteries.

Both Stacey and I had our stupid citified idjit moments where I tried to get the electric garage door opener to work, and Stacey thought she would be able to surf the web since her laptop was battery-powered¹.

Our one land-line phone is a cordless that therefore needs power, and we had not had the forsight to charge the mobiles. So we were without phone for a while. After the folks left on Sunday morning, we headed down to Target to buy one of those new-fangled phones I’ve been hearing about that use a cord to connect the headset to the main base and don’t require any sort of power supply. $10! Whadlethey think of next?

So we once again had a phone connection to harrass the power company with, only to get a recorded message saying our power would be on by Monday at 11pm.

On Sunday, I had planned on working 5 or 6 hours on some contract work, but, for better or worse, that wasn’t possible. So instead, during Roan’s marathon 3 hour nap, Stacey and I curled up on the couch in front of the fire with snacks and read books². After a couple hours of reading, I took a nap. It was just like pre-2003 all over again, only with less showering. Delightful!

One could advance several theories as to the unnatural doubling of Roan’s usual afternoon sleeptime: 1) sleeping in the main room on his little toddler fold-out couch, 2) sleeping in front of the fire, 3) not sleeping much the night before because of the cold, or possibly 4) the house being absolutely quiet, since there were no dishes being washed, laundry being run or conversations. Just the crackle of a fire and the occasional page turn.

In the evening Sunday, we were stinky, dirty, and faced with a pile of dishes in the sink. We would have done handwashing on the dishes, but I was sure that the moment we finished, the power would come back on. So we wiped the top layer of grime off ourselves and the boy, and headed over to Meehan’s, the official pub of Georgia Shakespeare. There were several families with toddlers that looked similarly grungy, and we overheard the family next to us excitedly exclaiming their power had come back on after calling home to check the answering machines operating status.

Thankfully, we also had regained power by the time we got home. We put Roan to bed, took some showers… and sat on the couch and read some more.

Delightful, simply delightful.

¹In fact, we could have, if I had had the forsight to look up our local dial-up number and write it down somewhere. Or perhaps, preprogram the laptop with it. But we citified idjits just think the power will always be there and DSL ever present.

² I am reading Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, and Stacey is diving into The Know-It-All. I’m enjoying Wicked quite a bit thus far. I find it has the same readability as the Harry Potter series.