The Power Outage

Newsletter 2023-12-11

Just when our date night was getting started, the power went out. If you think that made things better, you don’t understand marriage at all.

It was about 8:30 p.m. Saturday. My wife Lola and I had finished watching most of the new Indiana Jones movie with most of our kids. My thirteen-year-old, Betsy, of course had better things to do. She was at a sleepover with her usual group of friends. They basically live together on weekends. I should sign the guardianship papers so she stops getting interrupted by having to come home during the week. Having a family is such a burden to teenagers.

As for the movie, none of us are really feeling it. It was two hours and forty minutes long, which is an hour and ten minutes longer than any movie needs to be. I say this is someone who will watch ten one-hour episodes of any show about dragons. At least then I have the option of stopping. With a long movie, it feels like I have to watch it all the way through. The Indiana Jones film was full of the usual Indiana Jones nonsense, which for some reason I find less believable than I used to. A holy relic that melts Nazi faces or a cup that makes you live forever are both plausible but a crystal alien skull or an ancient Greek time-travel dial cross the line. I don’t have to explain my standards to anyone. I found the problem, and it’s me. Even if Harrison Ford was blameless, we’d all checked out by the two-hour mark. The kids were especially disinterested. They mainly asked for a movie night so they could spill popcorn all over the living room. I’d say it was so they could eat the popcorn, but I don’t have proof any of it actually made it into their mouths. It’s not really a movie night unless you explode your snacks across the house.

With forty minutes left in the movie, we all agreed that we’d stop it and finish it tomorrow, knowing well we’d never come back. We shut off the lights downstairs and prepared to head in our separate directions. The kids were going to play something loud that led to fighting and Lola and I were going to get a late start on our usual Saturday date night. That’s when the power grid flipped us the bird and plunged our house into total darkness. Our adventure was about to begin.

At the exact moment the power went out, I was making a snow cone. For a split second, I thought the blender blew a circuit. Then I realized the whole house was dark and it wasn’t my fault. I was innocent, which was all I cared about. My investigation was officially done. The downside to it not being my fault was that I couldn’t reset a breaker to get the power back. We were at the mercy of the utility company. Even worse, I wasn’t going to get my homemade snow cone. No one in history has had a harder life than me. I went on patrol around the house to make sure everyone was okay. The kids were predictably nervous. It was the same house they’ve lived in for literally their entire lives, but darker, which is always cause for alarm. Lola and I distributed flashlights and electric lanterns. Thankfully, the lanterns were charged for once. They never last for very long, but while they’re on, they emit enough light to burn out your retinas. They make rooms brighter than when the power was on. We had a candle, too, but only in our room. Coincidentally, Lola lit all three wicks right before the power went off. It was date night, after all. That wasn’t to set the mood. It was to cancel out the smell of the garlic and onion potato chips I planned to bring up to our room. As with movie nights, the best date nights are low on romance and high on snacks.

My next step was to wander the neighborhood. As a Midwestern father, when there’s a weather related danger, my first instinct is to go outside. If you ever want to meet all the dads in your neighborhood, stand on your front porch during a tornado warning. My greatest fear any time the power goes out is that it’s just us. Then the power company won’t be in any rush to restore electricity. Ideally, when the power goes out, it’ll be huge swaths of the city, including the important parts where all the rich people live. That way, I can be sure our crisis will be escalated to the top of the power company’s to-do list. The first look outside wasn’t encouraging. The blocks to the north, east, and west of us all had power. The outage seemed to be limited to us and a few other blocks directly to the south. Luckily, those blocks included a restaurant full of people. Surely at least one of them had an aunt or brother-in-law at the power company who they could call for a favor. The outage also included two stoplights at busy intersections. They were completely off. If the power company ignored us for too long, people would definitely die, which was the best news yet. High stakes situations guarantee immediate service. I finished cruising the neighborhood and returned home full of important information. My work as a dad was done.

When I got back, Lola already knew more than I did without leaving the house. She used her phone to hop on Facebook. Usually, the local chatter pages are just people complaining about anyone building anything anywhere for any reason. Apparently cities should be frozen in amber in your late childhood and never, ever be allowed to change. Occasionally, though, those pages contain useful local news. Someone on there posted that a transformer was on fire about three blocks south of our house. That made sense. The power seemed to be out in a straight line in that direction. I don’t understand how the power grid is set up, but it’s evidently structured in a way that when anyone else in our city loses electricity, we lose it, too. It’s a phenomenon known as sympathetic power outage, and I hate it. We’re the shared failure point for everyone, which tracks with the rest of my life. The good news was the utility company knew what was going on. I didn’t need to call anyone to complain. I could sit back and do nothing, which is always what I do best.

Lola and I weren’t going to let a little power outage interrupt our date night, which was so packed full of planned activities that we could squeeze it in after watching most of a way-too-long movie with the kids. Normally, we sit on top of our bed in our third floor bedroom, which is like a separate apartment isolated from the rest of the house. Lola cross stitches following patterns on her laptop. I play Stellaris on my Xbox Series X, carefully managing a complex galactic economy hellbent on melting down. For our shared activity, I turn on a second laptop to stream a show and connect it to Lola’s Bluetooth shower speaker for better sound. We also both have our phones in case either of those other two multitasking activities don’t hold enough of our partial attention. It takes the use of quite a few simultaneous devices for us to be able to tolerate each other. If we were toddlers, strategically ignoring each other in close proximity like that might be known as parallel play. I prefer to call it a good marriage. We interact just enough. The show brings us together for conversation. We can usually keep up with what’s going on as long as we don’t make the mistake of picking something with subtitles. These shows can’t expect us to actually look at the screen. That’s a deal breaker.

The power outage knocked out a good chunk of our devices, but not as many as you might think. I couldn’t use the TV or Xbox, and the Wi-Fi was down, but both of our phones were charged, and I could set mine up as a hotspot. I turned on my laptop and the Bluetooth speaker to stream the three Doctor Who holiday specials while Lola used a neck light to cross stitch in the dark. All of our hardcore survival skills were on display. Our pioneer ancestors would have been proud. We were truly roughing it.

The kids, meanwhile, threw a party of their own. They begged to stay up past their normal weekend bedtimes, which we agreed to. How much trouble could they really get into without power? About as much as usual, it turns out. Two of them had phones with SIM cards, meaning they could stream YouTube like normal. Only my eight-year-old, Waffle, was out of luck. Her phone is Wi-Fi only. One of her sisters could have set up their phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot if they were feeling generous, but it’s always dangerous to rely on the altruism of siblings. Instead, they played together for once. They went downstairs and collected our color changing pumpkin lights from Halloween. We have enough for a lightshow worthy of Vegas thanks to going overboard with our pumpkins once again. The kids changed all of the lights to white and lined them up around one of their rooms. It was enough light to get a suntan. The girls played board games and hot potato while only occasionally streaming YouTube on their phones. For the most part, they kept their screaming and fighting to a minimum. That likely means they were up to something they didn’t want us to know about. It’s a lot easier to keep secrets in a dark house.

We were lucky that it was a warm night. It was nearly 60 degrees during the day, so going without the furnace overnight wasn’t a big deal. The next day, the temperature was expected to dip into the low thirties and stay there for good. Midwestern weather is always an adventure in all the wrong ways. If the power had stayed off into a second day, we would have had options. We have friends and relatives who live minutes away. I’m sure they would have been thrilled if we rolled up out of nowhere and imposed ourselves upon them. There’s a reason none of them have given us a key to their house. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that. About 10 p.m., the power came back on. The kids were having so much fun with their board game night under the pumpkin lights that they didn’t even realize it. Lola and I, on the other hand, noticed right away. Our first move was to shut off all the lights that had been left on, which was almost all of them. Nobody in this house understands how light switches work. Once they were off, our room was about as dark as it was during the power outage. Maybe we didn’t need power as much as we thought we did. Just kidding. The second the power came back on, we both started charging our phones.

A few weeks ago at Thanksgiving, my father-in-law went on and on about how he got a great deal on a portable power generator. It couldn’t run an entire house, but it could support a few key appliances. He was thinking about powering his fridge rather than his wireless router, which is why we’ll never see eye to eye. Every time there’s a power outage, I think about getting a generator, and every time the power comes back, I immediately forget. With the recent outage, I’ve started the same circular thought process once again. My parents have long dreamed of installing a robust natural gas generator that could power their entire house for days at a time. They’ve lost power for three day stretches twice in my life, which proves mother nature hates my hometown. How many times in a row do you have to get smited before you finally move? My parents still haven’t pulled the trigger on a unit. Generators of that size are expensive, and there’s no guarantee you’ll ever actually use it. I’m sure that once they upgraded, the power grid would stabilize and they’d never lose electricity again. If weather patterns are determined by one thing, it’s spite. As for my house, I don’t think I’ll get a generator, portable or otherwise. Every time we’ve lost power, it’s only been for a few hours. As long as our phones are charged and we have plenty of batteries for pumpkin lights, there’s no stopping us. Hopefully the power only goes out in colder months so I still have a way to chill my beer.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James