My morning didn’t get off to the best start and the only reason I’m not in a bad mood is because the whole situation makes me laugh when I think about it. As those of you who live around here know, we had a storm move through this morning.
Now I’m not sure if it was the storm that woke me up, or if it was my bladder that was about to burst, but nothing annoys me more than waking up and having to go to the bathroom anytime close to when I’m supposed to get up, so the first thing I did was check the alarm clock. Problem. I can’t see the alarm clock. We have no power. At this point I’m thinking “I need to set my travel alarm so that I don’t over sleep.” So, I reach for my travel alarm and go to set it. Lovely! It’s 6:04 a.m. Not only do I not have power and have to go to the bathroom, I don’t have to be up for at least another 30 minutes and there is no way I’ll be able to go back to sleep now.
At this point my need to go to the bathroom over-rides my frustration with the fact that I’m being cheated out of sleep so I make my trek to the bathroom. Another problem. My bathroom is pitch black and I’m having trouble finding the toilet. Since I have no idea where my flashlight is, I decide to light a candle and I start the search for matches. Luckily, I remembered where I left the matches the last time I used them and it didn’t take long to find them – striking them was another story. I could NOT get them to strike for anything. After the fifth attempt on the third match, we have flame. So, I light a candle, take care of the business at hand, find my flashlight, and go back to bed.
As I suspected, going back to sleep wasn’t going to happen. Eventually, I just got up, lit several candles in the bathroom and made a feeble attempt to try to get ready. You know, putting make-up on by candle light is an interesting experience. I really didn’t want to leave my house looking like a 10 cent hooker from the corner store, so I was extra cautious not to apply too much. But the eye liner was the best. Not only is it kind of hard to put eye liner on when you can’t see very well, but to top it off, I had the hiccups – BAD. I’m sure any female reading this knows what I’m saying. It’s a steady handed job and hiccups make that difficult.
This whole experience this morning got me to thinking about how much we depend on electricity. Since our hot water heater is electric, we only have as much hot water as was in the tank already (luckily enough to wash my hair). The hair dryer was out of the question, but my first thought was to dry my hair at work. Of course, the thought of leaving the house brought about a whole new question – “how do we get out of the garage?” Yes, I know about the emergency release on the garage door opener, but neither of us had ever used it and weren’t sure how difficult of a task this would be. And what about the refrigerator? How long can the power be off before the food inside starts to go bad? And forget cooking anything because neither the stove nor the microwave worked. The power also went off at work and the server was having some issues. You would have thought the world was coming to an end by the way some of my co-workers reacted to the fact they couldn’t connect to the server or to email. It was only 8:30, the day wasn’t a total loss yet. It’s amazing how big a part electricity is to our every day lives – maybe too big of a part. But you know what? Though I’ve often thought I would enjoy living a simpler life, I don’t think I want to live one that simple. I have a new found appreciation for electricity!
Oh, by the way, the electricity finally came back on around 7:30 a.m., so we missed another opportunity to try the “emergency release” feature on the garage door. Maybe next time.
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