A thunderstorm rendered our power system kaput last night. Sometime between 7 and 8 pm, the lights went out, and as of this morning, they still hadn’t come back on. Our usual evening activities – reading, fiddling on the computer, watching a DVD with our daughter, seeing Leno/Jon Stewart/whatever else my husband surfs across – all were knocked out of commission by the lack of juice. The game of the evening was to avoid stepping on a cat in the dark. Getting ready for work this morning was fun, too – doing one’s hair and makeup by candlelight, you tend to use a very light hand, for fear of looking like this.

All in all, assuming that the power’s back on when we get home this evening, a relatively low impact event. We got a little bit of extra sleep (not much else to do), but otherwise, other than needing to replace some food in the fridge/freezer, all it did was convince us that we need to be better prepared should something like this happen again. We had the one flashlight at the ready, but one flashlight for three people isn’t very useful. Better to have some money on hand, in case our outage were more widespread than just our little neck of the woods. Supply of bottled water would also be good to have in stock. But candles were easily found, there’s plenty of canned food in the pantry, and our stove is gas (though uses electric to spark the gas – a candle lighter works just fine in a pinch) – we weren’t going to starve. Die of boredom- maybe. Die of starvation – nah.