Lights Out! 10/3

Late this afternoon, I headed over to TYB to help out with the kids and go on line for a while. It had been overcast for much of the day and windy. While I was at TYB, the wind was really picking up. The kids were all laughing at all the stuff blowing around and Themba and Fetsi kept repeating “ It is going to rain soon. It is going to rain soon”. I thought I better get on line in case there was a storm coming. I had just opened my hotmail account when the lights went out. There was a whirring sound of things shutting down and something in the office kept beeping. So after a quick email to my parents, I shut down the computer, said good-bye and drove home.

So, it's about 4:30 when I get home. It is still light out, but there are only windows on one side of the house, so it was already pretty dark inside. James, who had been over at TYB, told me there was a gas burner in the closet that we could use to cook things, so we hauled that out and then quickly decided it would be too much work. We decided on sandwiches and pudding. Quick and easy. Thankfully, both water tanks had filled up during the day, so we did have some water, even though the pumps didn't have power to run.

After dinner, we decided to head outside. It was still really windy out. There was a lot of stuff on the yard from the trees-branches, flowers and leaves. The kids loved running around. We played Red Rover, Ring Around the Rosy, London Bridge is Falling Down, and more. Today was another no napping day, so at 6 we took the kids in, put their pjs on and put them to bed. They were both asleep in less than 10 minutes. It was really dark in the house now. We did have a big flashlight, and Darin had filled one lantern with oil (quite the process), so we did have some light. We decided to watch a movie, hoping that between the DVD player and computer we would have a couple hours of battery power. So, we spent the evening watching Legally Blonde 2 in a very dark house. We did have to stop the movie on more than one occasion because something would land on one of us. It was usually just a moth, or there wouldn't be anything there when we'd shine a light around. After the big spider we saw this morning, we weren't taking any chances.

We were almost to the end of our movie when all the lights came back on. After almost 4 hours of not having power, we were back in business. Darin was most excited that we could turn the ceiling fan on again. It was really muggy today and our house, which is usually cool, has really heated up. So ends another day in the bush.