Last night we had a power failure. Since moving here we’ve only had one other significant power outage and that was during the daylight hours. Our neighbors have always told us that it’s very common to lose power here so I always have candles on hand, and we bought a lantern the year before last when tropical depression Ernesto paid us a visit but we’ve never used it.
Sidebar: Most of our power lines are above ground; not buried. Add to that all the trees that fall down on a fairly regular basis and you can understand why we have power outages.

We had a thunderstorm roll through around 7:00 p.m. last night just as we were eating dinner. We had three very close hits (if not our house than something in our yard), and on one of the lightning hits the power went out. It poured; more lightning and more thunder. We sat there watching the rain come down and about 20 minutes later the power came back on. The little thunderstorm moved off to rain on someone else and we cleaned up the dinner dishes.

An hour later found us settling down in front of the television to watch Flashdance and give Rick a much needed back rub. All of a sudden we were sitting in total darkness. Hey, who turned out the lights? Somehow, this seemed more final than the previous one. We scrambled around in the dark grabbing candles and remembering where we’d put the lantern. It was so dark! Soon we were sitting in the comforting glow of candlelight. Kind of nice. Peaceful. We carried lanterns down into the yard to put the solar cover back on the pool. So very dark.

We didn’t get to watch Flashdance, but Rick did get his back rub—by candlelight. Two hours later as we got in bed to read, the power came back on. It went off again in the middle of the night too. We only know because we were rudely awakened by the beep of the smoke alarm as the power came back on. This morning everything had to be reset, from the coffee pot to the pool timer. Oh how we depend on our electrical gadgetry!