Couldn't post for a few days, as Tropical Depression Ernesto paid us a visit and we were without power from Sat-Mon afternoon because of downed trees and wires. The good news is that it coincided with the Labor Day holiday, so the three things that would otherwise make such an outage difficult weren't present: 1) the good post-storm weather made both heat and a/c unnecessary, 2) school hadn't yet started so we didn't have to worry about homework without light or the computer, and 3) I was home from work so both Nicole and I could stave off the kids' boredom.
I suppose I could add a fourth item that made the outage tolerable -- the new TV season hasn't yet started. In the words of my son, could you just imagine if the power was out during the premiere of 24?
At the risk of being corny, it actually had the side benefit of forcing us all to read, play board games, and go to sleep early (nothing like a power outage to make you realize how much earlier you could go to bed with no TV). I could use this blog entry to make all sorts of grandiose moral statements about how modern family leisure is too dependent on the computer and the TV, or tell you about how I tried to make parallels for my kids between our situation and those left homeless by katrina (the idea being there is no way to appreciate what they are going through without some frame of reference, even if it is pretty insulting to compare the two). But I will just close with this thought: nothing like a power outage to make you realize how much of your daily life is really controlled by just a few organizations -- power, telephone, dept of highways, maybe one or two others, and if you are like me you just take their competence (or incompetence) for granted.
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