Monday musings

It was not a dark and stormy night, but yesterday evening, whilst in the middle of sewing, the power went out. (Still, I wonder if I am the only one who thinks, each time, what if the power doesn't come back on...) Our plucky heroine was grateful for the pocket flashlight that lives on my EDC keychain, as for some unknown reason the closest candle lantern was without the requisite tea light, and the spare candles are not stored with the lanterns. Not to worry, since they are stored in several places round the house, and fairly quickly there was light enough to navigate. One lantern set in the bathroom and another was easily carried with while various needful tasks were done. This is actually the first long power outage since moving here, they were much more common back in OlyWa.

Various electrical things turned off, the computer shut down and the cords unplugged; oh, there was bone broth burbling away in the crock pot... Not okay, meat soup cooling down overnight is a germ farm by morning. So unplug crockpot, pour broth + meaty bones into a pyrex dish that has a lid, set on granite trivet to begin cooling down. Move things off the top of the chest freezer, and rearrange contents enough, while holding lantern in other hand, to make a flat place to set the pyrex full of soup... I am glad that the freezer is a chest freezer, the cold mostly stays put when you open the lid, unlike the fridge...

That done, there is not much else to do here in the dark, the candle lanterns are not really bright enough to read by. Went out for a tiny walkabout to see if it was obvious how large the power outage was... hmmm, three streets on one side looks lit, the other direction is all dark, but the other side of the river is lit up as usual. There is one house on the street that has all their lights on, I wonder if they have some sort of internal emergency power? a generator in the basement? A few houses also seem to have found their emergency candles. The moon is full, which means that there is quite a bit of light outside, and returning to Acorn Cottage I see that at least one of the solar path lights is functioning. Aha, that will work nicely for a bathroom nightlight! Once that was taken indoors and set on top of the medicine chest there was nothing left of the evening but a horizontal visit to dreamland....

The whole small event showed me several obvious gaps in my emergency preparations, and living on the Pacific Rim, such preparations are a necessity...