Lights Out

 Since moving to Denver (North Carolina) in May we've had 3 or 4 power outages at the house. In at least one of those instances, we were notified by the builder via email that there was a planned power outage, but the others were all surprises. With the exception of one of the outages, all of them have been just a couple of hours. I am assuming that most of these outages are due to the fact that there is still plenty of construction going on in the neighborhood. (Only half of the community is built.) And that once the neighborhood is complete there won't be as many. (I don't think I've lived anywhere where we've had power outages every other month.)

Yesterday, we had a long power outage - at least the longest we've had yet. It lasted 8+ hours and went on until after I went to bed. While I don't want to have power outages here on a regular basis, I will say that yesterday's outage was kinda cool in the fact that we spent our night by candlelight. 

It was nice having no electronics to lean on (besides our phones, but we weren't on them the whole time the power was out.) It was a cool ambience to have a quiet house with light flickering in the kitchen. We are completely unprepared for situations like this, so we only had a few candles (thank you, Yankee Candle), but we made it work. Bobby also got out a couple of camping lanterns that we have in the event that our candles didn't cut it (but they did).

I pondered last night just how much our household relies on others to supply us with things we consider necessities (such as electricity), and completely understood why people decide to go off of the grid. I think not having electricity and relying on other resources for light would be potentially cool - if I lived in the right environment. I also thought about life during pioneer times, and how convenient and inconvenient it would be to live during that time period. (I know, I know - I think about unusual things sometimes,) 

In the end, the power came back on, and I was so thankful that it did. Our entire home is electric, so we really rely on it.