Where were you when the lights went out!

Yesterday as usual I thought I had my afternoon all planned out but circumstances proved otherwise. At about 2:00 pm I was out in the garage doing some anticipated woodworking when my electric drill suddenly went quiet and all the lights turned off. At first I thought I had just blown a circuit breaker but a quick trip into the house proved otherwise. We had no electricity.
Shortly thereafter Laurie went into Jason's room with him as she unsuccessfully tried to coax him into taking a nap. Meanwhile Annalie and I played a game of "Chutes and Ladders" using the fading light coming through our front window to see. Afterword I decided to drive into town with Jason to see what I could see. My hope was that it was just a local outage that would be back on in less than an hour. I turned on the radio and discovered that this outage was much larger than just our neighborhood. All of Gold Beach and Brookings were without power. Eventually our local electricity coop located the problem to a sub station north of Gold Beach. Great news! Then the bad news. The problem was on the Bonneville Power side of the sub station and would require their own crew to be dispatched to make the repair and restore the power. By the time I heard that I knew that we had better start making some preparations before it got dark. We began to gather flashlights, candles, and lanterns. I retrieved our camp stove from the attic and set it up out in the garage. I also hauled 15 gals of water from the creek so we could flush toilets as needed. We ate some warmed up leftover soup with sandwiches for supper. Fortunately the house was warm since we had the pellet stove going for some time before the power went out. Later I took Annalie and Jason into town for another look at Gold Beach when the power is off. Except for the courthouse and the hospital it was mostly just a few windows with small lights flickering in them. I explained to Annalie why they needed auxillary power so they could continue to deal with emergencies should there be any.

Back at home we entertained ourselves with a game of "Hide 'n Seek" since a mostly dark house provided lots of hiding places. At about 9:00 pm we had the perfect excuse to call it a day. Sometime around 10:00 pm the power returned and must say I was glad to see it. Even so we made the best of things and made some good memories as well!!