Let There Be Light. Please?

As my husband said, it’s like we’re living in a two room house with a sleeping loft.

Yes, we haven’t had power since Saturday afternoon. Halloween was cancelled, there was no school for two days, and there are tree limbs down all over the place.

It could be a lot worse; we have a generator. It’s powering the refrigerator and the freezer – so no lost food. We can plug the furnace in, so we have heat. There are extension cords snaking up from the basement, so there are two electric lights – one in the kitchen, one migrating back and forth from the dining room to the living room. A rotating cast of kitchen appliances gets plugged in as needed: coffee grinder, coffee maker, toaster, rinse and repeat. And – oh to glory be – the router is plugged in, so we have wi-fi in the house. We have hot water, because we never replaced the old inefficient hot water heater with a spiffy tankless one that needs power for its controls. And the gas stove works, if you light it with a match.

Oh, to be sure, there are problems. The dishwasher is full of dirty dishes. There’s a load of half-done laundry stuck in the washer – because it’s a front loader, it won’t open without power. I’m running out of clean pants. There’s no electricity upstairs, so we’re brushing our teeth by candlelight. But really? They’re first world problems.

I’m grateful for all that we do have.

That said, I really hope that ConEd makes good on its promise of full restoration by midnight tonight. I’m not holding my breath though: ConEd’s outage map says that there’s only one house out in my entire neighborhood – something I know to be patently untrue. And the town police just sent out an alert urging people without power to call ConEd – and that "If you do not call the number your power may not get restored."

Is that some kind of veiled threat?

Maybe it's time to go off the grid.