Power Outage Equals Family Time

This afternoon one of the powerlines on our street came down, dropped on two cars, sparks everywhere, flames, burning cars, tires melted to the sidewalk, etc…

Not your everyday occurrence.

This didn’t affect the power to our house, but the power company switched it off anyway while they made repairs (which involved fire engines, lots of trucks, inspection of poles, etc…)

I went home early, before Nabila got home with the kids, as I wanted to get the front door unlocked (obviously the garage doors aren’t going to open) and make it easy when bringing the kids home to an unfamiliar, dark environment.

I brought out the candles and lit them all around our house. It was really quite nice. Shortly after I got it all set up, Nabila and the kids arrived and we had some fun with no electricity - just us, talking and playing with flashlights.

We then went out for dinner. Well, Nabila, Julian and our neighbour did, Jasmine was playing up - she was just plain tired, so her and I took off and left the others to eat the good stuff at the Yarrow Bay Grill. Jasmine and I headed to the office and I fed her some food, let her sit on my lap and gradually fall asleep with her head on my desk while I wrote code.

At 9pm, Jasmine and I headed back to the restaurant to pick everyone up and then we all made our way home.

The power was still out, but we lit the candles again, talked, played and had fun.

At 10pm the power came back on.

“Hey Julian, was that fun or what?”

“I like it. Can we do it again?”

Nabila and I agreed that from now on, once a week, we’re going to turn everything off. No lights. No computer fans. No random beeping.

Just candles and talking.