The Lights Went Out

Today I realized just how much we depend on electricity. Like it is actually kind of frightening how much we do.

I woke up this morning, opened my curtains and grabbed my laptop, nothing out of the ordinary, yet trying to connect to the internet is where the problem started. For some reason I had no wifi connection and I could not figure out why. After about 10 minutes of trying to get it to work I happen to glance at my alarm clock and see that it's blank. Look at my stereo, again the screen is blank. I flick my light on and nothing happens. So great, the power's out, no big deal though right?

Normally I think power outages are kind of fun. Gathering up the flashlights, lighting candles, playing board games rather than watching TV. It forces you to change up your habits for an hour or so. Mind you, that's when it happens in the evening. Daytime is a whole other scenario.

I headed downstairs to have breakfast. Originally I was wanting to have some left over ravioli but since there's no microwave to heat it up in I'll just grab some bread and make toa-oh wait, toaster won't work either. Cereal it is.

I spent the rest of the morning trying to do things that don't require electricity. I sat and watched my dog in the backyard for about 5 minutes. She was sniffing at something in the snow and didn't seem to notice a bird hopping around chirping at her. There was once I actually thought the bird was going to jump right onto her!

A house with no power becomes rather inconvenient to our habits. It's strangely quiet, flicking a light switch when entering a room does nothing anymore, it starts to cool down without the furnace running, and there's no internet! (This was probably the most upsetting to me :P)

After the power had been out for a couple hours my mom and I decided we may as well go run some errands since we weren't getting anything done at home. And that's when I learned how to disconnect a garage door so it can be opened manually rather than by pushing a button.

Electricity has provided vast improvements to our standard of living but I think it's also made us a little bit lazy. And perhaps we take for granted just how easy things are for us.

DFTBA,

-Kim