early morning weirdness...

Woke up this morning about 5:00 a.m.... which, sad to say, is not all that unusual. Generally I wake up about 5:30, if I don't accidently eat chocolate before I go to bed at 10:30 or 11:00 and find myself wide awake again by 1 or 2. Where upon I start wracking my brain to figure out what I did to cause me to be so wide awake I think I will never get my eyes to stay shut again, and then remember how much I enjoyed gobbling down all that forbidden fruit.

So being awake at five oc'clock is not really all that unusual: except for the fact that it was pitch-black dark. It is never, never that dark at my house: the neighbor to the south has had flood lights on since she moved into her house about seven years ago. They shine directly into our bedroom windows. When no one was actually living in the neighboring house, while it was languishing on the real estate market empty for months and months, I went over there a couple of times with my ladder and unscrewed the bulbs. But the owner either screwed them back in or replaced them and finally sold the property to a woman who lives alone. Obviously somewhat uneasy about her aloneness, as she never turns off those twin flood lights mounted to all four corners of her roof. We have just learned to leave the blinds closed on that end of the house, and got accustomed to light leaking in around the edges, so we never sleep in complete darkness.

But this  morning it was Dark.  There is usually some ambient light coming from the street light up on a pole in front of our house - but even that was out. I could not turn over and look at the digital clock: it wasn't on. I had to pull the covers over my head to see the luminous dial on my watch to know what the time was.
It's a mystery to me...

Paul reported he took a shower with his flashlight propped up on the bathroom counter, pointed at the ceiling, and was concerned about how hard it would be to get out of the carport, when he would have to open the door with muscle-power, instead of pressing the button and expecting Georgia Power to do the work.

And reported that everything was back in working order by the time he came out of the bathroom, so worries were unfounded.

So.... if you ever run out of things to be thankful for: there's always public utilities. And the financial resources to pay your power bill, so you don't have to wake up in the middle of the night when it is as dark as the inside of an cave, and wonder if you remembered to write the check. Just another on the long, ongoing list of Blessings we are rarely consciously aware of. Can you even begin to imagine what it would be like in this miserable heat without air-con. and ceiling fans?