ROLLING BLACKOUTS!

So. I get home Thursday and discover that I can’t get the garage door open. I park in the driveway and walk inside to discover a stifling house with no electricity.

It’s now ~6 PM Thursday. My wife tells me that we don’t know when the power will come back on – and it’s been off for hours already. We were blacked out to protect the rest of the power grid during a particularly hot weekend.

So! Time to retreat to a hotel. Finding one took hours because all the nearby ones were full of people affected by the blackout as well. We finally find a vacancy around midnight – a room with two queen-sized beds.

There are five of us.

We go out to eat, and then my wife realizes she’s left something important at home so we stop by the house. It was well after sundown and the entire complex was black as night – no street lights, no lights in houses, nothing. She goes inside and cannot see a thing so I lend her my phone to use as a flashlight. She finds her precious item (her World of Warcraft authenticator, to be precise) and we return to the hotel.

(Anyone who knows I own a laptop but wonders why I didn’t post over the weekend can do this math: 1 laptop + 1 WoW-hungry wife = no laptop.)

After a horrible night’s sleep, I realize I’m not going to be able to go to work on Friday and phone in. We eat, and then we just…hang around. Waiting. Waiting for word on when we can go home.

And I start thinking about post-apocalyptic games and how completely unrealistic they are 🙂 Somehow, all of them, despite the ruin of the world, have working power and most of them have working water as well. It’s as if all the buildings fell down but the most vital services remained, when in truth, the exact opposite would be true – many fully-intact standing buildings but with no power or water making them practically uninhabitable.

ANYhoo. The power finally got turned back on around 10 PM Friday night, so we returned to our abode, exhausted, hot and full of very bad food. Fortunately, the power didn’t go off again.

So that was my weekend! How about you?