Powerless

We live in an historic neighborhood on an ancient power grid, so every time the wind blows, we're forced to live like the Old Order Amish. That is to say, without electricity.

That's why I didn't blog yesterday. The wind blew.

The outage lasted about 14 hours. After dark, it started getting quite nippy here in the house. But my afternoon and half-night of "powerlessness" wasn't wasted because I managed to learn several important things:

Wet firewood does burn. Eventually. If you have a gas starter in your fireplace. But wet wood makes a lot of smoke. If you care about the smoke, you're not all that cold.

The light of a hurricane lamp is not sufficient for reading a novel. You need a Coleman lantern for reading.

A gas-powered camp stove works perfectly well on your kitchen table. You can heat water and make hot chocolate. You can also roast marshmallows over the flame.

An iPod makes an excellent flashlight if you need to go into your dark office and find something on the cluttered desk. And you can listen to music while you're searching.

Neighbors who phone or come to visit you when the power's off are not really trying to find out if your power is off, too, and if you've heard anything from the electric company. They're just bored because they can't watch TV or cruise the internet. Power outages promote friendship between neighbors.

And this wraps up another blogging week for me. I hope everyone out there is staying warm and has plenty of light to read by.