Power failure

Windy sleety day. We have Science Club scheduled. It's at our house, because the power is out at the place where we usually hold it. We go on a planet walk, pacing out the scale distance between a soccer-ball sun and the various planets. We give up after almost a kilometer of walking when we're still only at Saturn. They sure are small and far apart, and, as we head into a wicked sleet-laden wind, we comment on how it sure does get cold as you get far from the sun!

Science Club wraps up around dusk, and our fellow club-members are just pulling out when our power fails. I pull out some candles, check on the phone with neighbours to make sure the outage is more than just us, and to ensure that someone has reported it. Noah stokes the fire in the woodstove and I pull soup out of the freezer. We make space on the woodstove to heat up soup and coffee and then we settle down with books and board games. I read aloud for a while. The kids read to themselves. We play long games of Carcassonne, Frog Juice, Qwitch and Set. We stir the soup, I drink the coffee. More reading.

Chuck gets home from work and we eat supper. We'd set aside tonight to watch the last hour of a video, and we briefly bemoan the fact that if we had enough of a flicker to get the DVD out of the player, we'd be able to watch it on the laptop. But although the power does flicker on for a couple of seconds, we're too far from the DVD player to press 'eject' in time. Ah well... what's a few more hours without electronics. We do more reading and board games. Kids do their practicing. It's piano by candlelight, which seems worthy of a photo.

We all love power failures. Various kids say several times "I love power failures." The kids boo when the lights come on.

Ten minutes later they're sitting in front of the computer with their eyes glazed, unable to imagine life without their precious screen time, complaining when I suggest they ought to do something else for a while. What contradictions they are.