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Courtesy of The Sound Effect Generator
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Aug. 14th, 2003
Courtesy of The Sound Effect Generator
Well, that was fun. Actually, yeah, it was; just long enough to be fun.
Mind you, I wasn't one of the beleaguered commuters stuck in the Toronto subway between stops, or in an elevator halfway to the ground floor; if I had been, I'm sure "fun" would not have been the word I would choose. But here we had tuna and salmon sandwiches for supper, with (rapidly softening) ice cream for dessert; and then we built a bonfire out back to get rid of the wood scraps left over from hubby's most recent construction project (a garden workshop/shed, which he's designed and built from scratch -- he says there's "nothing special" about being able to do such a thing and that he doesn't really know what he's doing, but you could have fooled me on both counts).
We roasted marshmallows (though Nicholas quickly decided he preferred them "raw") and tossed more wood on the fire, and enjoyed the summer evening. Every half-hour or so I went in and checked the radio to see if there was any info about when the power would come on -- which of course there never was, because nobody seemed to know, and CBC news had resorted to asking callers how they were planning to spend their "candlelit evening". At 9 p.m. we brought a tired, happy Nicholas inside and tucked him into bed, and then I called my brother in Toronto (who was sitting in his pitch-black basement apartment with his three kids, two of whom were singing camp songs at the top of their lungs and seemed to be having a rip-roaring time), and chatted for a while. It was near the end of our conversation, at 9:32, that the power came on -- not for him, unfortunately, but for us. So, the power outage here was really only five hours -- like I said, just long enough to be fun.
Something like this does make you realize, though, how completely dependent on power you are. When I was trying to think what to make for supper I kept
having to remind myself that no, I couldn't use the microwave; no, I couldn't use the oven; no, I couldn't use the range either. I couldn't even boil water, in fact, unless I was planning to do it on the bonfire... I was embarrassingly aware of how ill-equipped I am to function without electricity and technology. My husband, who is farm bred and raised to work hard and "make do" with whatever's on hand, could probably build himself a log cabin in the middle of the wilderness and survive quite nicely. Me, I'd be dead or insane in a couple of weeks. I am such a city girl. (And such a cyber-geek, since my first thought when the power went off was "Oh rats, no computer!" -- but we knew that.)
Mind you, I wasn't one of the beleaguered commuters stuck in the Toronto subway between stops, or in an elevator halfway to the ground floor; if I had been, I'm sure "fun" would not have been the word I would choose. But here we had tuna and salmon sandwiches for supper, with (rapidly softening) ice cream for dessert; and then we built a bonfire out back to get rid of the wood scraps left over from hubby's most recent construction project (a garden workshop/shed, which he's designed and built from scratch -- he says there's "nothing special" about being able to do such a thing and that he doesn't really know what he's doing, but you could have fooled me on both counts).
We roasted marshmallows (though Nicholas quickly decided he preferred them "raw") and tossed more wood on the fire, and enjoyed the summer evening. Every half-hour or so I went in and checked the radio to see if there was any info about when the power would come on -- which of course there never was, because nobody seemed to know, and CBC news had resorted to asking callers how they were planning to spend their "candlelit evening". At 9 p.m. we brought a tired, happy Nicholas inside and tucked him into bed, and then I called my brother in Toronto (who was sitting in his pitch-black basement apartment with his three kids, two of whom were singing camp songs at the top of their lungs and seemed to be having a rip-roaring time), and chatted for a while. It was near the end of our conversation, at 9:32, that the power came on -- not for him, unfortunately, but for us. So, the power outage here was really only five hours -- like I said, just long enough to be fun.
Something like this does make you realize, though, how completely dependent on power you are. When I was trying to think what to make for supper I kept
having to remind myself that no, I couldn't use the microwave; no, I couldn't use the oven; no, I couldn't use the range either. I couldn't even boil water, in fact, unless I was planning to do it on the bonfire... I was embarrassingly aware of how ill-equipped I am to function without electricity and technology. My husband, who is farm bred and raised to work hard and "make do" with whatever's on hand, could probably build himself a log cabin in the middle of the wilderness and survive quite nicely. Me, I'd be dead or insane in a couple of weeks. I am such a city girl. (And such a cyber-geek, since my first thought when the power went off was "Oh rats, no computer!" -- but we knew that.)