In the Dark

It seems that our country is experiencing a bit of a power shortage these days. There is not quite enough electricity to go around, so they've resorted to a random rolling blackout system. Currently, we lose power for about an hour almost every day, but the fun part is that we never know when it's coming. Most of the time, the outages happen in the evening, which means we get to spend some quality time in the dark.

Sometimes the kids will watch a movie on a computer; other times we read together. We have an emergency backup light that comes on automatically when the power cuts out, and of course our phones make great flashlights, too. We also keep some flashlights in a drawer really close to the emergency light, so when it comes on we just walk toward the light and we can find our flashlights. 

Driving around town, we see that it's not just residences that are affected by the blackouts, but businesses, too. It's amusing to drive down a street and see one dark block in the middle of a busy, lit-up street. We often see the blackout hit a new block, and all of a sudden everything goes dark. When it goes out in a restaurant, the people often just stay put, sitting at their tables in the dark, until it comes back on. 

One night recently, we tried to go to a restaurant, only to get there and find all the kitchen staff hanging out outside, smoking cigarettes. We weren't sure how far they were into their hour outage, but they didn't look like they were getting ready to go back inside right then, so we decided to go to a different place. Thankfully, our second choice had power.

Tonight it went out at our house right around 5:30, as the sun was almost down, so we decided to order our dinner rather than try to cook something in the dark. But the place we tried to order from wasn't answering their phones (probably because their power was out too and they weren't taking orders), so we had to make a different choice.

We realize that many people in the world would be thrilled to have electricity 23 hours per day, and we're very grateful for what we have, but we did want to give you a little picture of our life right now.