Lights Out!

We have lived in Mattoon almost 10 years, and in those 10 years we have lost power four times, one of those times we weren't even home (driving home following horrible storms in 2006). So I was a little surprised when our power went out last night. I shouldn't have been. The conditions were right: the counties near us were in a blizzard warning, and our county was in some wind advisory (I think). But, since it's a pretty rare thing, I wasn't worried.

So...I popped our leftover ham into the oven. We were sitting in the living room and about 15 minutes later the whole neighborhood went dark. It was actually kind of cool: where I was sitting, I could see out the window, and watched all the lights go out. Logan, of course, wasn't amused. He probably thought his parents were liars, because we told him the power wasn't going to go out (oops).

We used our flashlights on our phones to light our way to the kitchen to find the big flashlight and the lighter to light some candles. I even lit the kerosene lantern my parents got us as a wedding gift. Logan's Buzz Lightyear flashlight was actually easily located, so he toted that around all night. In the meantime, Matt decided to eat a bowl of cereal, while Logan and I feasted on the ham, which had heated up pretty nicely. We did all this around the dining room table (which we never eat at) around the fire place.

I was in the midst of charging my phone when the power went out, and only had about half a charge. I plugged it into the fully charged laptop and got it fully charged. The iPod was fully charged, so Logan was able to play some games and watch Toy Story 3. Power outages were not this fun when I was a kid!

Matt left for work a little earlier than usual, and Logan and I headed up to bed. We made sure all the candles were out, and grabbed all the fleece blankets from the living room. Naturally he had to sleep in my bed. So we get upstairs, get comfortable, and literally laid there for about 15 minutes when the power came back on! So, Logan had to accompany me back downstairs to shut off lights and the television. I'm glad it came on before we had actually fallen asleep.

Really, it was a pretty calm, cozy night. It was nice to not have televisions blaring, and while we had our phones, we weren't totally "plugged in." The house didn't get very cold at all (for us...we keep it about the temp of an igloo lol). I wouldn't want all my nights to be like that, but it was pretty nice!