Revelations Sans Power

Our power went out two days ago after a freak storm blew through here.

Nothing like no air conditioning during a really hot week to bring home how craptastic it would have been to live in the olden days, right?  And yet...

Yesterday evening, as we were sitting in the sun room, trying to catch a nonexistent breeze through the open screen windows, we realized the joy of being utterly and completely unplugged.  No e-mail to obsessively check and reload.  No phone ringing off the hook with someone needing something from us.  No documents to read or check.

No instantaneous anything.

Nothing but our drinks, sweating in the humidity from the cold of ice from the store, and the quiet evening of very little traffic and no television or radio noise.

Just conversation alternating with blissful silence.  And a constant silent prayer for a breeze.

Which was only interrupted once by a gooberish fellow haranguing his girlfriend about his "manly awesomeness" as he walked by on the sidewalk out front.  Note to gooberish moron boy:  if you have to tell people (by yelling in a rude and crude manner, I might add, so that the whole neighborhood could hear you because all of our windows were open) how manly you are, you almost certainly are NOT.

Being able to sit in the really quiet space, without filling it with mindless television or endless web surfing or anything else of the electronic variety?  Pure bliss.

I'll certainly take the air conditioning now that the power has mercifully come back on again.  Especially since my day will consist of cleaning out the rest of the freezer that did not get emptied yesterday, and doing a load or two of very, very sweaty laundry.

And I will definitely take the coffee pot working again.  That, in and of itself this morning, is akin to a miracle of ginormous proportions.

But the lesson that I have learned from the last few days of no power at our house? 

I need to unplug more often.  Everything else seems to reconnect so much better when we do.

And those connections?  Are what really makes the difference in the end.  

(YouTube -- Kansas singing Dust in the Wind.  Seemed appropriate somehow.)