Thursday, February 22, 2007

A night with power outage



Tuesday last week (Feb. 13th), due to the freezing weather all over the U.S. Midwest, power outage occurred in some areas in Bloomington and other central Indiana.

According to Duke Energy (Electricity company), there were about 50,000 households which experienced periodical power outage on that day, but 46,000 households got their electricity back after several hours, leaving the rest 4,000 without power overnight.

And guess what, our house was one of these unlucky 4,000. We lost power at 4pm on Tuesday and didn't get it back until 10am on Wednesday (which happened to be Valentine's day ;-). When the power is gone in our house, it means that we cannot even cook, since our cooking stove top is electric; and the central heating system in the house doesn't work either.

At first I thought little of the situation, assuming that we would surely get back power in a few hours, based on my experiences in Japan. But alas, it soon proved to be wrong. By contrast to myself, Amar was totally ready for the situation, and actually was even cheerful and excited when he learned that our house was totally in black!

As soon as I reported to him about the situation on the phone (N.B.: the university hadn't lost power supply), he assured me that he would come home as soon as possible, with hot food and lots of candles. Most restaurants in the town were closed due to power outage, but he managed to find one of the few ones that were open and got hot food there, which was a real treat for us that night. He also got a lot of logs for the fire.

"Hey Michiko, I got hot food for us! And I also bought a lot of logs to keep the fire going for a long time!"

As you can guess, this challenging situation stimulated his "sense of adventure", which he told me that he had acquired through a lot of experience of camping in the bush with his father in his youth.
After we ate the dinner with a candle light, he said,

"Hey Michiko, let's make a fire and heat water in one of our old pots, then we can have a hot coffee!"

Now you can see how he was enjoying the situation as if we were having some fun camping ;-) Well, it was all for good, of course(^^). All this time I was feeling just how lucky I am to have such a resourceful and countable husband, you know ;-).

So we put our old pot into the fire like this:


The coffee was great, and helped us to remain cheerful (and of course to keep me thinking how lucky I was!

After that, we even tried to bake my apple bread in the furnace fire (!), which I had been working on that day and had been perfectly prepared and ready to go into the oven just before the power was gone.


(LEFT: This was the dough being proofed before going to the oven (around 3:00pm). / RIGHT: Finally, the bread dough was thrown into the fire! What is the doom of this bread....?!)

(LEFT: ... So this was the doom of this bread. The bread was totally burned and black at the bottom. (>_<) / RIGHT: But the bread was supposed to come out of oven this way, if only the oven was working that night... @@)


*****

Next day, I took some snapshots of the icicles on the trees around the house, to show you what caused the power outage. (The electricity line was broken off because of these heavy icicles.)
But even though these icicles caused us much trouble, trees with ice flowers like this looked really beautiful, reflecting sunlight with shiny sparkles.


2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Michiko !

What an adventure in the middle of the winter ! It must be quite invigorating to feel that you can manage to survive without electricity for some time isn't it ?
I am sending you some (actually many) pictures from our last trip to Austria with the kids:
http://www.soniadeviung.photosite.com/album1/

Warmly,

Sonia

kiwismile said...

Dear Sonia!

Thank you for the comment - yes, it was quite an adventure, but it was funny and even a bit romantic experience as well ^^. And it was nice to know that my husband has such surviving skills ^_-♪

I have just visited your photo album --- what beautiful pictures and how grown up your two boys are!! I am really amazed and feeling a bit wistful... I miss seeing and talking to you!

Please say hello and send my love to all of your family.

Michiko