Adventures in the Power Outage

At 5:34 yesterday, the power went out. We’d had about a half inch of ice coat everything earlier in the day, so it wasn’t exactly unexpected. It ended up being out for around 4 hours. (Our house is in a very good spot to avoid power outages–not far from the hospital and Walmart. People want their hospitals and their . . . cheap junk products. I later learned downtown had no power for almost 12 hours.) Keep in mind, this is Maine, so when the power goes out, things can get cold very quickly. (The temperature last night dipped into the single digits.) Thankfully, we have our wood stove and enough wood to last us until summer and back into fall again, if the zombie apocalypse hits us. We discovered a few things:

• Kids really like blackouts. TRC and DC were pretty hyper, I think primarily because everything is so different. It’s a big adventure to them, and trying to corral them isn’t too easy when you can’t see everything.
• We need more candles. We had enough for the evening, but we’re running low now. We also could use a few more hand-cranked flashlights. (Why even bother with battery-powered ones? They’re always out when you need them.)
• We could use some water storage. Denisa and I got to talking (there wasn’t much else to do) while we were sitting there watching our wood stove, and that’s probably the one area that we’re weakest on when it comes to emergency preparedness. We’ve got a ton of flour (thanks to her bread making) and plenty of heat, but for water, we’d have to end up carting it in from the stream out back in an emergency, something neither one of us would like to do.
• I don’t think I’d do well as a pioneer or medieval serf. For one thing, a lot of the things I like to do require good light (reading and complex board games) or electricity (movies, computer games). That said . . .
• iPads are excellent blackout tools. I had board games, books, music, movies, and a portable flashlight, everywhere I went. Hooray for Apple products. 🙂