- Watch a movie until the battery on the computer dies.
- Light candles and do homework.
- Look at the stars and try to find or create our own constellations.
- Go for a drive.
- Make popcorn with a candle for lighting and eat it while sitting outside in the dark with the neighbors telling folktales and watching the kids play ghosts in the graveyard.
- Bake cookies. Unless your stove only works when plugged in.
- Cry.
- Play board games.
- Go outside, go for a walk, exercise but hopefully the power will come on by the time you finish or you won’t be able to take a shower.
- Go swimming. Eat something but shut that fridge door quickly.
- Sing and play guitar and laugh at the out of tuneness of the guitar and our voices.
- Perform a play and don’t worry about the acting, no one can see you anyway.
- Tickle the kids.
- Tell them a story, or rather, have Tom tell them a story.
- Sweat. Sweat. Sweat.
- Pray for a house with a generator, an automatic generator.
- Tell your husband you won’t live for another month in Djibouti without an automatic generator.
- Praise God for answered prayer (the power is back and your next house will have that generator).
*image via Flickr
This was awesome! I have a few additions:
1. Find the flashlights. It gets pitch black very quickly if it happens after dusk, and if you need to go outside, you don’t need to fall down the stairs.
2. My computer is useless when there is no power, as it needs to stay plugged in. I have a Kindle, so I have books and games to play.
3. It is amazing how much I can get done during the day without power and no internet!
4. When our children were still here with us in our host country, we would play games or read. One time they got their Lego creations out, or their “Bionicles” (Lego type robot looking things) and make shadows on the wall.
We sometimes have water when the power is off, so I can add washing dishes by candlelight, showering/bathing by candlelight. It’s funny how much you realize you need electricity or light to do once it’s off. My favorite thing to do- go to bed early. 🙂
I giggled at a couple of these- your experience sounds so familiar! We sing and play guitar, watch movies if someone has a working laptop, play board games by candlelight, or just sit and talk and enjoy the quiet. Usually there are about a half a dozen bars blasting loud music in our neighborhood, so a power outage brings blessed silence with it!
One of the things I do pretty often when the power’s out is cook with my headlamp on. I didn’t have it my first year on the field, and we used to have to Macgyver the solar flashlight to stay put and shine on the stovetop. Sometimes it got a bit precarious- headlamps are definitely the way to go! But sometimes we (like you) just call it a night and go to sleep.
Where we lived in West Africa, we lived constantly without power. Having power was the exception, not the norm. So my very intelligent husband installed solar lights all over our house, and we had a complete working set of light bulbs that ran off batteries. We used this all the time. How I miss my home in Africa! And how happy I am to have a husband that is smart enough to do all those electrical things!
I do, however, identify with all the points you wrote! It’s funny how you learn to live without power on-demand. We always had to conserve, of course, but our stove and fridge burned gas, not electricity. So we never went hungry for lack of power.
Ohhhhh, been there…
We’ve been on a load-shedding schedule for the last month ~ 12 hours off/24 hours on ~ and no generator, either. We choose a read-aloud book that can only be read when the lights are off. It gives the kiddos {and mama and daddy!} something to look forward to!
we live off grid so i just wondering what to do our generator uses gas now we afford the gasoline…so its just my old men and me. was not sure what to do with our time in the day we have lots of work but at night not sure no internet
??????????
thank you
miss lucy
goldenflower481@hotmail.com
Here in Sacramento, the power outage in peak and heatwaves sucks, must have power backup systems in place.