Painting In The Dark

So the crappy economy has finally trickled down to us. That's right, the hubby is down to 32 hours a week, which means he's home all day on Fridays. Don't get me wrong, I love spending time with my husband, but he's totally messed up my flow. I get nothing done when he's home because I'm either cooking for him or helping him with whatever project he's working on.

So to keep him busy last Friday, I suggested that he move the furniture around in our living room to accommodate our Christmas tree. He's an all or nothing kind of guy so he suggests that as long we're rearranging we might as well paint the living room to make our house a bit more presentable, before we fill it with people on Christmas Eve. Fantastic idea, so he comes up from the basement with 3 partial gallons of paint and says "what do you think will happen if I mix them all together?" Well the color wasn't that bad, kind of a orange, yellow concoction. The real bitch was that just after we pulled all of the furniture out of the living room into the kitchen, the power went out. Several minutes later squad cars and ambulances come screaming past our house to the intersection just down the road. Someone had crashed their car into a power pole and broke the pole clean off, live wires hanging on the ground. About 30 minutes later flight for life landed in the field behind our neighbor's barn and flew the car's occupant to a hospital in Milwaukee. From what I have heard, the man survived, but no less hit a f*cking pole at 55 miles an hour. Hopefully he'll be OK.

The road was closed so the bus couldn't get through to bring Mae home, so I drove my car up to the corner to wait for her with the officer who was manning the roadblock. I made sure that he knew we were without power and he said that the power company was already at the scene and we should have power back within an hour. Fine with me. So we went back to the house and painted until dark, when I decided to call the power company myself to get an estimate of when power would be restored. The nice woman on the phone said 8:00, so we ordered a pizza and continued painting by flashlight. The girls had fun making the living room look like a disco party while I was trying to paint the edges with a brush while hubby rolled the ceiling. 8:00 comes and goes still no power and at a very cold 6 degrees outside, the house was starting to get cold. We decided to go for a ride in the car to warm up look at Christmas lights. The kids were cold, and unimpressed, and just wanted to go home and watch TV. We went home, bundled up and all went to sleep in our bed, until about 10:00 when my house starts grooving like it's 3:30 in the afternoon. Washer hopping across the laundry room, Radio on in the kitchen, computer humming away.

It's amazing how quiet the house is when the power is cut, that's probably what bothered me the most, the lack of noise.