The Night the Lights went out in Belvidere

Two nights ago, there was that kind of pending doom feel in the air. I really wanted to start this post with, "It was a dark and stormy night..." but it wasn't. It was just creepy. Finally, around 7 I looked the front door to the east and ask Y, "What color is the sky?" She said, "Daddy's car," which is Amh-inglish for "Silver." We found H and looked out back to the west. I asked him the same question. He responded, "Green." "Yeah," I said, "Green bad. Green very bad." Y argued the color, but there wasn't anything negotiable about it.

We didn't go in the basement, mostly out of my own pride. We don't let the kids open the door on the other side of the laundry room because that's where all of Daddy's toys are, and it's a huge mess. So as far as they're concerned it smells bad and is dangerous, which actually is pretty accurate. Anyway, I didn't hear the tornado siren so we went upstairs to get a better look. H had just gotten his head pressed against the screen when *BOOM* the power went out. Mild hysteria ensued, but fortunately we found three working flashlights (the rest I found left in the ON position. Hmmm... I'm guessing Chris didn't leave them that way...) and a couple candles.

We had to kill some time before bed, so we played cards and later went out to inspect the tree that had been struck by lightning a block away. Later there was also this surreal orange sky behind the green, so everything had this unearthly orange backlighting. We tried to play another round of cards, but the kids were getting weird and having mini-Mag lights waved in your face every 3 seconds really lowers your tolerance for silliness, so we called it a night. It was, oh, about ten after 8. Whatever, there's no clocks. Go to bed. Y wanted to leave her flashlight on which we talked her out of. H confessed that in Ethiopia they didn't use any lights at night, which is what I figured. Ethiopia is better than some other African countries, but they still have a lot of electrical outages. When we were at the Hilton the kids slept just fine in the pitch black, but since we've come home they cry injustice when we turn them off at bedtime and have just recently quit turning them all back on.

Anyway, over all, everyone survived and to my surprise, when the power came back at 2 in the morning, not every light in the house came on. I think they both went through and flipped all the light switches once just to make sure the power was out everywhere. Yay for two wrongs making a right!