By MereCivilian in life — Jul 29, 2021

Baby MereCivilian’s first power outage

How a rare power outage caught me off guard?

Let’s get this out of the way first. My son handled the situation much better than I did.

I, for one, was looking forward to a relaxing evening. I finally got the spa repaired earlier today and was planning to just chill tonight. My son had much simpler plans with low expectations. This included having a few feeds and sleeping, maybe play with Dad if he feels like it.

Well, tonight was not my night. Because of bad weather, there was a power outage that affected over a thousand households. Credit to my energy provider for alerting me of the outage (I obviously couldn’t figure this out on my own 🤷‍♂️) and advised the power will not return till midnight. My first thought was how do they arrive at an ETA considering at this point, they had not discovered the underlying reason for the outage.

For a moment, I panicked and did not know what to do. After all, what is there to do without power. My wife was much more calm and organised. Almost instantly she lit up candles and the calming ambience inspired me as well.

While she attended to our son, I gathered some necessary gadgets. Foremost, my beautiful yet extremely red torch 🔦. This thing is a beast that I purchased over 10 years ago and is seldomly used. Obviously, after a full day of use, our phone batteries were less than 30%. I went hunting for battery packs and found the following in my travel bag (travelling felt like distance memory, took me a while to locate my backpack):

Thankfully, besides the magsafe battery, all others had juice and could charge my devices a lot faster than the magsafe battery. I also used the iPad Pro’s flash as a torch to light the room.

I was concerned that without power, there is no way to heat our bedroom, and therefore I quickly wrapped my son in a warm comfy waffle blanket.

As a creature of habit, I had a shower in candle light. I shower at night most nights and it feels weird when I don’t. I also found my room to be quiet, with no music or TV. I rarely download any music on my phone because what’s the point since these days we stream everything, anyway. It occurred to me that Endel does not need internet and therefore I played Endel from the iPad Pro speakers which are quite good. Endel does not require internet, or any downloaded music to play music. It’s pretty exceptional.

Obviously, without power, my airplay and Sonos devices were of no use to me.

Just when I was feeling settled, my son started crying and despite many attempts, he just would not settle down. This situation almost led to a lively discussion with my wife when with God’s grace, the power returned and I breathe a sigh of relief 😮‍💨 and so did my son.

It really is interesting how we take things for granted and how quickly we can feel stressed and/or unsettled when our perfect ecosystem is temporarily disturbed.

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