Stuck in a blackout: by myself

Last night a line of serious storms came in and hammered the region. The power flickered once or twice and then went out for good right before 6pm. I was somewhat prepared: candles, flashlights, blanket, water jug, etc. After I called the utility company to report the outage I looked around and realized, "mmmm, the hubs is at the game and I'm here by myself." My first thought was what I should eat for dinner.

So then it came to me- the things you should do if you're caught in a blackout by yourself.

First, get your lighting situation under control. Thank goodness I happen to have a plethora of candles and two working flashlights (bonus tip, buy batteries the next time you go grocery shopping). I set up candles all over my living room and kept one flashlight handy just in case I had to leave my living room. I nice lantern would have been helpful, but not essential.

Two, eat whatever ice cream is in your freezer. Logically speaking, if the power is off for long enough, the ice cream will just go to waste. You're doing yourself a favor by enjoying it before it possibly spoils. With that in mind, I treated myself to a feast of brownie batter and cookies and cream ice cream for dinner. It was like I was a third-grader all over again. After you've had your fill of ice cream make sure you stay out of your fridge and freezer. You don't want to waste whatever cold air is stored up in there.

Then, if it happens to be summer time I recommend opening as many windows as you can. Central air is fantastic, but it doesn't exactly work when there's no juice running through the wires. Plus, you get an added bonus of listening to the storm and that's somewhat soothing considering you don't have any music available (unless of course you have a boom box).

Normally, I would play board games or cards during a blackout (at least that's what I did when I was a kid), but when you're by yourself that's kind of boring. To add injury to insult, the only deck of cards I could find was missing the Ace of hearts and the King of clubs. That's just not going to work for a game of solitaire.

Find some type of entertainment. Maybe you want to sit out on your front porch and watch the lighting. I tried that for five minutes, but Jewels started convulsing and I didn't want to get peed on, so I went back inside. I picked up a book, but couldn't get comfortable because my two dogs were freaking out due to the previously mentioned storm. Finally, I turned on my laptop and popped in a movie. I should have gone with a chick flick, since I was by myself, but The Dark Knight was calling me. 153 minutes of Christian Bale- sign me up! Unfortunately, my laptop battery only lasted for the first two hours of the movie, so after the movie I went back to my book.

If the weather is nice out, then get outside. It was really weird, the rain stopped and around 8:30pm it was brighter outside than it was inside my house. So I took Jax on a little walk around the neighborhood. Of course it was during our walk that I noticed that it was just my street that didn't have power (that sucked!!!). I had a strong temptation to hop in my car and drive over to the mall, but I resisted the temptation and stayed home. The funny thing was that almost my entire street was outside. Kids were playing in the street, adults were chatting on porches and I met the foreign college kids that moved in down the street.

Call someone. Thankfully, my cell phone was fully charged so I went ahead and called my best friend. I was home alone and there wasn't anything to distract me. Although, we were talking for so long that I may or may not have signed myself up for a girl's trip next year in Hawaii. I may have to figure that one out.

Of course I was making serious headway into my book at 9:30pm when the lights came back on. Unfortunately, the power was just teasing me and went off again and didn't come back on until after 10pm. Thank goodness it did come back on because I didn't want to think about the possibility of not being able to shower. That's gross!!!

Funny enough, the lights came on just before the hubs returned home. So he missed out on all the fun things to do during a power outage. I don't think he would have survived. Take away his video games and tv and that guy is going to crack.