Lights Out

 Well, now I know how bored I am during a massive blackout.  Yes, that's right, on Thursday afternoon at 3:38pm, a problem with some transmitter lines between California and Arizona knocked out power to all of San Diego County and affected parts of Southern Orange County, Riverside County, Mexi-Cali, and Yuma, Arizona.

We lost power while I was at work, so we had to stay for a while to make sure critical freezers got plugged into backup generator power and non-critical machines and equipments got unplugged to save them from any power surges.  After that, it was uncertain how long power would be out.  SDG&E was estimating that the power might be back Friday, maybe by the afternoon.

We went home and sat around reading until the sun went down.  We had a couple of small flashlights, but nothing really powerful enough to light up a whole room.  Funny how no power gets people out of their houses and walking around talking to neighbors.  It was almost nice to be "unplugged" even if it was not our intention.

We were debating whether it would be best to leave the refrigerator/freezer closed since the insulation is supposed to hold for about 12 hours before all the food spoils or whether we should just open it and start eating our perishables.  We voted for leaving it closed and hoping the power would come back sooner than 12 hours (even though we later found out that 4 hours is really the max time limit for dairy products in an unplugged fridge).  We ended up sitting around chatting and drinking homemade amaretto :]  I guess it's never not a good time to drink.

 I attempted to crochet in the dark.  By feel and by the flickers of candlelight, I got a few rows of a new hat started, we'll see if it's all wonky later, haha.

And, because it is Saturday, here's something really weird from my sketchbook.  It's a grasshoppper-type insect with an ice cream sundae coming out of his antenna.  I imagine kind of like how a snail's eye stalk unfolds from inside, I imagine that the ice cream sundae is literally oozing out of his antenna, glass and all. 

I'm not entirely sure what my mind was trying to tell me when I had a dream about this.

((Lights Out by Breaking Benjamin))