So I’ve been experimenting with long shutter exposures on my camera and going out at night and trying to take some pictures, just me and my trusty flashlight freaking out the neighbors. Well it might be freaking them out if everyone didn’t go to sleep around ten, so unless I wake the dog up, I’m good. The weather has been creepily mild but even so I’ll stay up working, then take a bath, then go outside with the steam flying off of me and take a few pictures. There’s room for improvement, but it’s a fun new project.
So this evening, I worked until 8 pm, teaching my last Microsoft Word for Beginners class. I got home and done with dinner by 9. At about 9:05 the power went out, just as I was IMing with a friend asking me how slutty she should dress for her client’s holiday party. All the lights went off leaving me staring into the face of my glowing laptop, IMing to nowhere.
Luckily, I knew where the flashlight was thanks to my recent late night forays. Luckily, Ola is a nutty candle hoarder. Luckily she was also a decorater meaning that there was a fully functional kerosene lantern in the kitchen, just sitting there looking pretty. There was also a “you plug it into the phone jack and it works” phone in the house. So I copied down some numbers from my laptop and settled in among lantern light an a ton of candles to make a few phone calls. I like to pretend when there’s a power failure that it affects everyone else in the whole world, but apparently my friends in Randolph weren’t even affected.
When I was a kid power failures meant 1) eat all the ice cream, STAT and 2) each toilet has one more flush, use it wisely. It took a few power failures out here, before I got that it was okay to use the plumbing whenever you wanted, and there’s not much in the way of ice cream in the freezer anymore.
Before I got too cold and decided to light a fire, the power came back on. I would have taken a picture or two of all the flickery candles but the batteries in my camera were dead from too many late nights with the long shutter.
3 Comments
We were surprised by last night’s outage too. I was playing a video game and Sarah was working on an audio project at the time. Sarah called CVPS and apparently it was a scheduled outage to fix the Bethel station.
I hope you were able to find the cookies we left for you.
Are you using some sort of tripod with the camera? Those pictures look great. I’ve played with slower shutter for mine, but it always comes out blurry.
I’m embarrassed to say that I had no ice cream in the fridge during our recent power outage in Seattle (and everywhere else).
Although we were only without power for 16 hours, it made me realize we could be better prepared. I think there are still about 9k people in the city who are without power.
Nice pics.
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