I love electricity. And I love it even more when I can’t have it. Today a brutal thunderstorm came through my area and took down many trees and power lines in its path. Consequently, my home lost its power. There is nothing like a little loss of electricity to remind us of how dependent upon it we are. Sometimes, we are also reminded how thankful we should be for how tough the founding parents of our country were to be able to build the foundation of our great nation without even one little spark of the electric magic to help power their way. And a power outage may also remind us how miserable life would be if those crazy terrorists or any of the rogue nations we used to blather on about ever lit off an EMP – an Electromagnetic Pulse – bomb anywhere over our country and blew out our power grid. But anyway…
You can tell that good ol’ Ben Franklin, even though he supposedly discovered the stuff, didn’t have any electricity to power the lights of his home. Why wouldn’t someone want to go to bed early and rise early when there aren’t any freakin’ lights one in the house? Today, after the power went out, the sun set shortly thereafter; and, shortly thereafter that, I was out like a light, so to speak. I wouldn’t have been able to stay awake no matter what. There was nothing to do except watch the candle flicker, which, by the way, was rather entertaining for about twenty minutes. But it made me sleepy so by 8:00 pm, I was asleep.
But as soon as that power came back on around midnight and the house got its electric juice restored and began purring like a kitten getting its belly rubbed, I woke right up and couldn’t get back to sleep. I got out of bed, turned on all the lights, turned on the TV, turned on the AC even though it wasn’t hot, looked inside the fridge without knowing what I wanted to eat and pondered over my choices a little longer than I should have just because I now had the power to do so, and then went to my chair and fired up my laptop feeling like a 21st Century Man is supposed to feel—enlightened.
However, as I was typing away at this post, the electricity went out once again. And once again, my house became unnaturally silent. I’m typing only by the light of the laptop, which, according to the little battery icon in the tray, will only be available for nine more minutes so I better get this finished and published before it’s too late. Besides, without any electricity to charge me up, I’m once again beginning to feel sleepy. Hopefully, this time the electricity won’t come back on until around ten in the morning so I can get sleep uninterrupted and fully recharge my battery.