Winter Fun

It's Sunday morning, the clocks are forwarded, and the power has at last been restored - for now. Mother Nature decided to have fun with some of us here in Lewis County: rain, freezing rain, thunder and lightning, snow - then the trees and branches paid homage to Sir Isaac Newton, eliminating power on and off for most of Saturday, and then conking out for good around 8pm last night.

So while the power lasts (never any guarantees out here in the boondocks), I thought I'd share some of our Saturday evening with you. My son is home on a college break, daughter #3 was here, and we had two grandsons over for the evening. When the power went out, candles were lit, heat was no problem (until very early Sunday morning - by then the house had cooled considerably), so I went upstairs and grabbed my guitar. For the next hour or so, we sat in the living room singing songs.

I'm afraid I was unable to cover many of the requests from my grandsons, because I had never heard of any of the artists they wanted me to play. When they wanted a Beatles song I had them covered, but we decided that since the world already has Kid Rock, I might as well be Geezer Rock.

Just one evening without power, and you get somewhat of an idea of how our ancestors lived without power. With power, everyone had their own little world: me on my laptop, my wife on the PC, the boys on PS3 (that's Playstation 3 for those of you who don't have kids around), my daughter watching TV in her room. Without power, everyone joined together and we had a great time spending time with each other.

We humans tend not to see the downside of things that make life easier. In this case, the advent of microchips and satellites have enabled us to do things we never dreamt of 20 years ago. As we sail along on this sea of new inventions that give us a lot more free time, I guess its not such a bad idea to take a step back in time every now and then and see some of the good things that were lost as we "progress".

Earlier in the evening we had played "Family Feud" on the PS3 with the boys, but they just lost interest because none of the questions related to an 8 or a 9 year old boy. By reconnecting and remembering the benefits of spending time together as a family, maybe I'll just have to arrange for our own power outages on a more regular basis.