the sound of silence

Anyone who follows the news knows all about the dreaded Hurricane Irene and its' attendant power outages. There were floods, wind-borne ills, and some people even died.

Us? Fortunately we only lost power to the house.

I guess the rain began sometime last Saturday afternoon while we were attending a surprise party for my first-ever boss (I worked as a lawn-mowing boy, and learned a lot from that job). When I went to be it was gusty and rainy but we had our electricity. Our older son woke us several times, the last I recall was about 3:15 am Sunday morning (according to the clock). By the time I got up we were in the dark.

And stayed that way until Wednesday night.

Ok, I admit that at first it was kinda cool. No TV or computers, our cells worked so we could check the news. We grilled our breakfasts outside and warmed some water for instant (blech) coffee. Charcoal-roasted bacon tastes really good, as it turns out. But it takes a lot longer to start the fire and cook up al the food that a family of 6 needs.

The kids pretty much looked lost all week. We managed to find some fun: card games, reading, hanging around out on our patio...stuff like that.

In the midst of all this Jack had his first day of school. It went off without a hitch thanks to him (he was happy about it) and my wife (a huge help in that regard). When Jack's unhappy he's like leading a Labrador somewhere it doesn't want to go.....he'll just STOP. You can force him, but he'll make you work for it.

Happily, he scooted off for the bus and has loved it. All 2 days of it thus far.

I was fortunate enough to have bought the 3rd of the "Song of Fire and Ice" stories written by George R.R. Martin, it's something like 900-plus pages long so I dove into that. Carol's still on Book 2 because...well.....she's slow.

Our kids decided to all huddle together at night on our big sofa to sleep in each other's presence. We did have to worry over our food (charcoal-grilled roast is really good) but we got lucky and found some dry ice. Dry ice is expensive crap, lemme tell ya....

So Wednesday night we were dealing out the cards on our table by candlelight with assistance from my cordless flashlight to play a game my daughter calls "BS". It's a bluffing game, you have to lie about the cards you're playing and if you get called on it (with the happy cry of "BS!") you either hand the discard pile across to the player who called you (if you were truthful) or you take that pile yourself if you lied. The object is, of course, to lose all your cards. I tend to get called more than most, and the kids seem to take glee when I lose and are very glum when I win.

We never found out who'd win, the power flipped back on in all its' glory. It was back to TV and ipads and all the other junk that occupies us here. We transmogrified from interconnectedness as a group to our usual state of disconnected connectedness to the worldwide meh.

and, hypocrite that I am, I'm posting this on that same meh.......