Powerless on a storm day

We awoke to darkness. No clock, no bathroom light and most importantly no heat on this icy, chilly morning.

I walked slowly down the stairs, making sure my foot landed securely on the next step. 5:30 in the morning. What could I do? No electronics to distract me. It's too dark to read. I still have my cell phone. With a single connection to the outside world, I can verify the school situation. Can't surf too long, the battery is only half charged. Next, I need to find out how long this outage will last. On the power company's website, it states the power could be off until noon. Piece of cake, I think to myself.

I doze off to sleep on the couch waiting for daylight to emerge. My daughter wakes me up. She comes downstairs to verify if there's school. Excited for 14 seconds, she jumps for the computer. This is her first true encounter with being powerless. She then tries to turn the TV on. Finally she reaches for the iPad. It's got 17% battery left, but no wifi connection. I tell her to save the battery life for later. She responds, "no worries, I'll go get the charger". Poor little girl hasn't figured out yet that life is dominated by electricity.

My son wakes up. When he wakes up, everybody wakes up. The loud little boy that he is doesn't yet understand the value of a whisper.

With the whole family now awake, I turn on the propane fireplace. Without the benefits of the blower, it will throws limited heat. Some heat is better than none.

What happened next was marvellous. My kids played together. We all sat around the fireplace and talked. No distractions... We played two board games. My kids volunteered to go outside and played together. On any other day, we couldn't pay them to do that. We even got the Nerf guns out and ran around the house shooting each other.

Finally, we got out of the house at 2pm. My phone needed to be recharged so we went for a drive, got a needed dose of caffeine.

At 4pm, the power company updated their website. We could be powerless for another day. No big deal, especially when today was so much fun.

Tonight we're all gonna sleep together. For once, the kids are looking forward to bedtime.

In the absence of power, today was indeed an electric day.