Followed By an Even Badder Evening

You'd think that having a tree almost blocking your road, and discovering that your power was out, would be the low points of the day. But you'd be wrong. Things went from bad to worse as the evening wore on.

It was 4:28 when we discovered that the electricity was off. There was still a little daylight getting into the house, even with the overcast skies. I asked Hick to get some flashlights ready. We knew we only had one flush in each of the three toilets. That I wouldn't be warming up our Chinese leftovers. No air conditioning. No water to drink, only what was in the pipes, since the well runs off electricity. We had hopes the food in FRIG II would survive. And that Hick would make it through the night without his breather.

With nothing else to do, I sat down at the kitchen table and scratched my scratchers in the dim light filtering in the three windows. Welp. I only won $11. Hick was fiddling with flashlights. None worked. Not even with new batteries.

"I have these other two bigger flashlights. But we don't have any D batteries."

"You can go to town and get flashlights and batteries."

"Nah."

"Set those two candles on the cutting block. Get out the matches. Then we'll be ready when it's dark. I'm not leaving them burning. The smoke makes me cough. But I can set one in the bathroom so I can see."

I don't know WHY Hick couldn't be bothered to drive the 10 minutes to town. The wind was down, and it was only raining lightly by then. Surely he didn't want his delicate wifey to go out in that!

Hick sat in the living room recliner, running down his phone. I played Free Cell Solitaire on HIPPIE, who had a full charge. Around 5:30, we got an email from the electric company that our power was out. No known cause. By 6:15, Hick was hungry. And decided to go to Dairy Queen and get us chicken baskets. As soon as he left the driveway, we both got an email that the cause of the outage was a downed tree, 513 customers without power, and the restore time was 4:00 A.M.!!!

At least there was some hope on the far horizon. I grabbed a little ice before it melted, and filled up my metal water bottle with water left in the pipes. Hick texted me that I should go to Pony House, but I had not heard anything from The Pony. Anyway, my supper was coming!

Hick returned with NOT my delicious Honey BBQ Chicken Basket with ranch dressing, but with a dry, dry chicken basket with GRAVY (yuck). So I had to choke down those dry, too-crunchy chicken strips, with only salty white gravy for dipping. In the near-dark. 

After eating, Hick put batteries in the two flashlights. He said the guy at the Dollar Store told him "A lot of people have been coming in and buying flashlights and batteries!" I guess so. Hick could only find three double-packs of D batteries. They cost a fortune! It was $14.76 for six batteries! If he'd been there earlier, he probably could have saved money on a bigger pack. Anyhoo... one flashlight worked great, but the other gave off a faint yellow beam. 

Oh, and Genius sent me a text that only said "Woooo!" Then a picture came in:

That's his $100 winner that he had just scratched, even though I sent it two weeks ago. Good to know SOMEBODY won something. Though I couldn't really be joyous for him, sitting there in the dark with my $11.

At 8:55, The Pony sent me a text: "Oh no! I somehow just saw this."

A likely story! Anyhoo, while texting Pony to pass the time, at 9:04, OUR POWER CAME ON! The first thing I did was plug in HIPPIE. The second thing was flush the toilet. And the third was go wake up Hick in bed so he could turn on his breather and go back to sleep without dying.

Such a relief that we didn't have to wait until 4:00 a.m. for electricity. But still an unpleasant evening.