What Would We Do....

A few nights ago, the line of storms that wrought hell across the country moved through Atlanta. We were assured by the salivating weathermen that our chances of tornadoes were "slim" and just to expect bad thunderstorms.
We did have the thunderboomers as expected, and driving rains. I drove home in between a patch of them and made it safely indoors before the next round of amazing gulleywashers rolled through.
(I'm using all my favorite storm terms from the weatherman of my childhood - Stan Wood.)
Anyway...the storms were bad but really at my house anyway, not so bad. Just thunderstorms. Anyone who grew up in a big flat place like me and the husband would barely pass a second glance at the storm. There are storms and there are STORMS, this was the former.
But right as we were getting ready to put food on the table - we lost power.

For the first time in my children's memory - we had no electricity at night. It's happened before, but they didn't remember it.

I was glad of the digital world as I downloaded the flashlight app for my iPhone a while back so I whipped it out and made my way upstairs to find real flaghlights and camping lanterns. We set up dinner with our candles (and my husband mocked that three wick candle I got him for Father's day years ago!) and ate our dinner in the calm of candlelight, with the curtains blowing in cool air from the rain that was still pouring outside.

Georgia Power said not to expect electricity back before 11pm, so after supper we were stumped for what to do.

We're fairly digital people. Right now I'm logged into a virtual world holding six cats so that they'll be happy and loved. Digitally loved. I'm also uploading about 300 pictures to snapfish. I'm talking on Plurk to my plurkies and I Facebooked and tweeted today. I'm also blogging (obviously).

So what to do when your digital options are rendered dark? We could've played with the cell phone except I didn't want to run down the battery in case of emergency.

We returned to one of the most excellent choices on the Earth, since oh, the written word was invented.

My husband read to us.

First we read King HawksBeak and then he broke out one of my favorite books from childhood, THE BORROWERS. As he read to us, I fell asleep on the sofa listening to the tale of Pod, Homily and Arrietty combined with the rain pouring down outside.

About 10:30pm the lights came back on and we bustled the kids off to bed. The oldest boy, who had been the BIGGEST complainer about how TERRIBLE our night was going to be, smiled at me as I tucked him in and said "That was kind of nice, reading stories. We should do that again some time."

He's right. We should.