Blackout!

The storm came up quite suddenly. I was running to the store to get a few things for supper. When I went in, there was an interesting line of clouds in the distance. When I came out, there was an ugly mass of clouds right overhead. It was really windy, but it hadn't started raining, yet. Halfway home, it started with a vengeance. There was heavy rain and pea-sized hail. I managed to make it home. I dashed inside. The hail let up, and we settled in to eat and to watch the heavy rain.

After supper, there was a tornado warning. Our family room is downstairs, so we went downstairs and turned on the TV. The radar had caught something that might be a tornado, but it was moving away from us. We stayed downstairs, just in case, but we didn't see any reason to keep watching the weather. We turned on a video.

That's when the blackout hit. Our basement doesn't have a lot of windows, and of course it was dark outside, so this blackout was really black, at least at first. We joked a bit, and played a few rounds of "I'm thinking of a word that rhymes with..." After a while, that got boring. The storm had let up, so we wandered back upstairs. In the living room, there was enough light from the windows to play Catch Phrase, so we did that. There wasn't much else to do. No computer, no TV, no radio. It got to be close to bed time, so we brushed our teeth in the dark, and went to bed.

Around 10:30, Mrs. Jogger and I both woke up. The power was still out. We started to get a little worried. We wondered whether the power company even knew about the problem. Maybe no one was even trying to fix it. We found a couple of flashlights and stumbled upstairs. There were no streetlights. There were a few lights in some of the houses, but they might have been battery powered. We were just wondering what to do when the power came back on. "There," I said, "I fixed it."

The power was out for about four hours. I don't think anything in the freezer has spoiled (I checked the ice cream specifically) and the frogs and fish seem to have survived a few hours without their filters. There's a little water in the basement, like there always is after a heavy rain. So everything is OK.

And that was our adventure for the week.