Winter power outage

Just when I was contemplating the undesirable need to wake up my small son for school–I had a late education class last night and we practically dove into bed right after we came home–I got a phone call reporting slick roads and school closures. I was kind of glad because it allowed me to escape having to wake up a tired boy who tends to need a lot of sleep…but I also felt a strange sense of awe. As in, “How odd.”

Alaska doesn’t seem to get many “snow days.” I know Washington, D.C. shuts down if there’s more than an inch of snow on the ground, but in here if we shut down schools or operations for bad weather we’d lose a functioning city. That said, “bad weather” is relative. To us, it just doesn’t happen all that often. Recently it was “quite cold” (we had minus 20 for an extended period of time) and as soon as it warmed up (true to Alaska fashion shooting up to the other end of the extreme as opposed to day by day warming) the first thing everybody knew to expect was a bunch of snow. I guess we didn’t expect it to be rainy, at least not yet, rainy enough to make driving conditions quite dangerous.

Well, the rest of the nation must expect it of us as well, as I never hear on the news of “mounds of snow in Alaska,” as opposed to places like Minnesota, where it somehow qualifies as news.

As I was musing the odds of this situation, the power went out. My newfangled phone, the cordless type with the digital answering machine attached to the main base (with two other smaller base locations around the house), went dead. After the initial, “Whoa,” I admit I got a bit serious because I thought about the woman whose story made the news recently. She had shot a would-be repeat rapist who returned to her home, this time cutting the power in her house. Between the pitch dark of winter mornings in Alaska and the loss of even the light from my laptop, it struck me how dark it really is with absolutely no light. And then I realised how handicapped I was because even though I’m equipped with plenty of candles and a couple of flashlights, the candles and matches are in my kitchen, flashlight in my laundry room.

Eventually I turned the laptop back on, since only the Internet was out, and used the light from it to make my way to the kitchen for candles to find my flashlight. (I couldn’t see what I was doing in the laundry room.) Once I had myself set up back in my room, little Walkman radio plugged into my ears, I thought, “What now?” I listened for awhile to news of brownouts through the city and thinning traffic slowed to a crawl.

About ten minutes later the power returned; my son had slept through all the “excitement.” Pity, I had been hoping to occupy some of our time with a few rounds of “Trouble,” a game he got for Christmas and one which even I find slightly addicting.

So what to do with our day? Well, I’ll probably do much of the same I had planned for myself: lots of classwork and a bit of cleaning up around the house–with slight alterations to account for the presence of my boy. As for the little guy, well, he sleeps still as I type this. But, given how cold it was over Christmas vacation (even too cold for us, who kept our children indoors much of the time) and how warm it is now, I hear the snowpants crinkling already.