Revelations of the 2-hour Power Loss
There was freak storm yesterday, a bit of thunder and lighting, a sudden downpour and it was over as quickly as it had started. But the storm managed to knock out the power in our neighborhood. My bestie and roommate from Ohio State, Jen is visiting us. Jen was going to make fajitas for dinner, we had a whole evening planned. We joked that without electricity we might need to take our eyes off the screen, make eye contact, talk, maybe pull out a board game or two, find some candles, get drunk and make an evening out of it.
Nuwan came home around the time of the outage and realized the only reason he could enter the house was because we were home to let him in. How is losing power equate to getting locked out? Simple- we use the garage door opener to enter the garage, and then enter the house from the side door. The garage door motor is powered by… you guessed it, electricity. Without power the garage door won’t open from the outside. We have a home security system that is wifi-connected, it could let us into the house, but that too requires power.
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Loss of power meant no wifi, home security beeped at us a few times and then shutdown, it sent us emails and texts saying, “No power, no power!”. Our stove is electric, so Jen’s fajitas had to be put on a hold. Nuwan said he wouldn’t be surprised if more people were locked out of their homes, we depend on electricity, wifi and some form of connectivity to enter our houses. Who uses a key anymore?
Nuwan’s prediction was spot on. 10 minutes later we hear a knock on our door. A friendly neighbor was locked out of his house. We laughed so hard when he came over, Nuwan said we would love to offer you some tea but… we laughed some more.
The house started to warm up and get muggy. It was a hot day in Columbus yesterday with temperatures in the 90s (mid 30 C). Nuwan suggested that we might have to spend the night in the basement, the coolest part of the house. Funny thing was when he said that I told Jen we have a bed downstairs and we can pull out the air mattresses, it’ll be a slumber party. Correction, we have air mattresses that needs to be inflated with an air pump that needs to be plugged in. So, unless someone wants to manually blow air into a queen-sized air mattress, we don’t have a functional air mattress. Here we go, another dependency on Mother Electricity.
The evening progressed kids were getting antsy and hungry so we decided to head to a fine diner (read fast food) for supper. As we were corralling the kids into the car I got a text from another neighbor. She and her two daughters were locked out of their home too. I comforted her saying we are hosting another neighbor and that she is most welcome to stay over at our place. She said as soon as power is back on the first thing she will do is keep a set of her front door keys in her purse.
Speaking of front door keys, I am embarrassed to admit we had to first locate ours. Yes, I confess neither Nuwan nor I keep or recognize our house keys. We just knew that there is a random drawer of miscellaneous junk that had keys. There were 6 sets of assorted door keys, one of those had to be The One. Some keys belonged to older properties we lived in, one set belonged to a neighbor-friend who has since moved to Wisconsin, I’m pretty sure 1 key belongs to my childhood friend who lives in Mumbai and viola, the last key we tried was the key to our home. We laughed so much as Nuwan tested each key. I am proud to say we now have a key to our house which will let us enter the home in case of power loss.
Kids in their car seats, house keys in my purse and feeling so accomplished, Nuwan unplugged his hybrid car and we zipped away for dinner.
