Unplugged.

I bet a lot of us were this weekend. Thank you, Hurricane Irene!

Given my near-panic-attack feelings the two times this spring/summer when I had to put my computer in the shop for 5 days, I was very nervous about how I’d handle being unplugged. (Seriously, I like you all that much. Seriously.).

My unplugged-ness lasted 39 hours. No lights, no phone, no Internet, no movies. I broke at hour 37.5 and drove to the Panera Bread near my house to use their free wifi. Go figure.

Being unplugged wasn’t all bad. Besides the panicked trip to five stores to try to find ice for my two melting freezers! (We found ice at the 5th stop – it was like striking clear gold! The power came back on before the 48 hour safety mark).

A few brief moments of “disconnectedness” and I did miss touching base with those of you that I tweet… However, I felt oddly peaceful.

The good part is, since most of our house is natural gas powered and we have city water, we still had running water (that was hot!), flush-able toilets, and stove top cooking. That definitely made our time very endurable!

Since we camp a lot, we also felt pretty prepared for a little bit of roughing it. In fact, we even brought out some of the camping gear like our coffee pot and lanterns to help us weather the storm. We had plenty of food and water, so we were content.

What did we do?

• The house got cleaned a lot more than usual! There wasn’t much else to do! Handwashing dishes for two days not bad (we never had to wait for clean dishes). And I went to bed early! Shocker.
• Church was cancelled, so we had our own reading and prayer time.
• We played Scrabble by candle and flashlight. I won. Which is actually not the norm. And I had the Q, the X, the K, and other sundry annoying letters to work with!
• Our 18 month old pretty much ran around as usual. He learned the word “candle” and that fire was “hot.” He also learned how to handle a flashlight!

What did I miss?

• Light. I really don’t like trying to find things in a dim room.
• Reading. Again, eye strain from trying to read with a lantern or flashlight kept me from my nightly chapters (I love to read late late at night!).
• Information. I kept wanting to look up a recipe, directions, hours the store opened online. No go. What did we DO twenty years ago!?
• Photos. I tried to take pictures but the lighting was so bad except mid day that I couldn’t get anything good.

Overall, given the severity of the storm and the damage to houses along our Connecticut coast, we had it pretty cushy. I spent my hours without power in a warm “storm-bubble” with my family. Maybe I’ll be reaching for the plug myself sometime soon!

Have you been through a similar emergency? How did you prepare? Which “modern conveniences” did you miss the most?