When The Power Is Out
It has almost become a seasonal event that our neighborhood may lose power all of sudden after a severe thunderstorm. It's so unexpected and unpreditable because you never know when and which nearby transformer explosion would cause the power outage or which tree may fall down. And to make it more dramatic, we lose power in the evening right before dinner time.
No one is happy, but we take it easy
In my household, the kids would get irritated because when the power is out their iPad time and TV time are affected or completely gone. What's even worse is they may not be able to go to school the next day or days. My wife would hate it when she's in the middle of a conversation with another writer friend or a Zoom meeting. And for me it means my work is down—I can no longer connect with coworkers on Slack and I can no longer SSH into the remote servers... The most redicious thing is none of our phone would be able to text or surf the internet via data plan, becase where we live seems to be a "signal dead zone".
Be grateful that we can still improvise
Compared to some other deadly damages areas I really think we are lucky. My 2000 lumen Dewalt LED spotlight with 5 AH batteries comes handy and would last hours or even days. And we can still cook dinner with the gas stove burner and a lighter. After the rain if it's still bright outside, we would spend some family time in the driveway. And when the next day arrives but without the power restored, we can still open the garage door manually and go out.
Our two refrigerators would survive for 6-10 hours or maybe more depending on how hot the room temperature gets to. I've been thinking about getting a gas powered inverter generator for emergency if the power goes our for more than 12 hours. But I'm still not settled on this considering the noise it makes and all the safety concerns.
This is real life
We must stop regarding unpleasant or unexpected things as interruptions of real life. The truth is that interruptions are real life.
I always say "Normal days are the best days" to appreciate the normal daily life—no power outage, no sick kids, no work drama, no problems around the house, and no sleepless nights. But "normal" can be very subjective, "real" is what life is—dealing with the unpexpected situations, getting out of the personal comfort zones, taking risks, fixing what's broken, trying to prepare for future events, and moving forward.