42 Dreams of Arizona Bay

It’s really dark with no lights on. Especially unexpectedly, and you can’t find the flashlight.

I was happily playing World of Warcraft when boom, the power went out. I thought perhaps it would come back on, and it tried, for a second, and then another minute later, it tried again.

I freaked out a little. I’ve watched too many movies where the power is cut so burglars can break into your house. It also doesn’t help that for the last two weeks, our alarm system has been giving off beeps intermittently. I should note that we don’t pay for a subscription for it, so it doesn’t work. We don’t know how to use it, and haven’t missed it. $30 a month seems like rather a lot when you’ve just paid thousands in closing costs and have signed your life away.

Then I told myself to be reasonable. I have worrying that somebody has been hearing the beeps that go off occasionally and know that we have a problem with the alarm. So I said, stop it. It’s raining and you know any time there’s a speck of rain in Fresno, bad things happen.

I still couldn’t see. Then I remembered I had my cellphone, so I used its light to give me very faint illumination. I quickly looked for a flashlight I was certain we had upstairs, but couldn’t find it. So I went downstairs, by the light of the phone, to look for a different flashlight, one that I hoped would be in a cabinet. Which it was.

Batteries dead. I kept pushing buttons on the cell phone to keep some light and then I realized that we have candles and matches. So I fumbled for some matches, take a match to where the candles are and realize I need the striker thing on the box. Duh.

Get the box, try to light a candle, nearly burned my fingers. I chose a different candle. I lit another one, but I was apparently too close to the smoke detector, which then went off and freaked the hell out of the cats, not to mention me. I couldn’t get it to turn off but it eventually cleared up on its own.

Then I had enough light to realize that we had a candle lighter right there, so I used that instead to light some of the more difficult candles.
Candles are dangerous to have around cats, though, so then I figured I’d better go reexamine the flashlight. I thought we might have some D batteries that were three or four years old, in an unopened package. Better than nothing.

Found them, put them in, and the flashlight worked. And with the brightness of the flashlight, I realized I’d knocked down the bottle of bubbles I’d bought for Halloween, and that it had opened and spilled all over the wood floor.
Yeah. Most of it was gone, on the floor. So then I cleaned that up, in the near dark.

Then I spent the next 15 minutes looking for my stupid flashlight so we could have two. No luck. So then I compromised by reading in the dark and waiting for the Heather to get home to hand off the flashlight. I didn’t want to leave candles burning because of the terror of the ultra bad kitten.

So yeah. That’s how I spent the remainder of last night. Then I went to bed and read by flashlight for a little bit. It was kind of a cool thing, to pretend like I was a kid again, until I realized holding the flashlight and holding the book just right was not all that fun.

Woke up, and the power was on. Glad that’s all the time it took. From the look of the alarm clock, the power was out for about three hours.