Six Hours

Wednesday evening, for no apparent reason, the power went out. That is, the power went out again. In fact, for the fourth time this week. The other three times happened during a storm and lasted for only a short time each. This time, though, the power went out and stayed out, for six hours.

What is six hours? It's 360 minutes. More important, it's a quarter of a day and 37.5 percent of the time one remains awake on average. To make it all worse, it happened right after I'd finished eating dinner with my three-year-old cousin Grace, part of our "one-two-three sleepover!" party planned for that night. Instead of baking cookies and watching movies, we went on an "adventure" to find flashlights and a carseat.

At Target later that evening, we bought a package of 30 AA batteries and some Clifford stickers. Grace picked up and put back many toys as we wandered around. (Strange that she didn't insist on keeping any.) We also swung by Krispy Kreme (just opened) to watch the doughnuts being made. And then we drove home, hoping against hope our trip to the store had been in vain.

We spent the next 20 minutes putting batteries into flashlights. Grace took a bath by tap-light, and I spent the evening calling people and the power company on our sole non-cordless phone.

On the bright side, the power did come back on an hour before the limit the power company gave (that would have been 1 a.m.).

And by the way -- on Thursday, another thunderstorm hit, and the power went out for the fifth time. What a fun week.