High winds on Saturday, when a blast of cold air came through, caused a power outage on my street and many other areas. At first I thought it was a minor interruption and a bit of an annoyance. My daughter was visiting from Cleveland with her dog. I had been browsing the Internet and had just found an image of a heron that was in the right aspect ratio for my digital art display, but hadn’t yet uploaded it.
 

Soon it became apparent that the outage was widespread and that my power wouldn’t get restored for quite a while because only some of the houses in the neighborhood had lost power, a small enough area that it was far down on the priority list for repairs.

We put on warmer clothes, since we had no heat and it was getting chilly. After a while we went out to dinner at a nice steakhouse, for which our daughter proudly paid, now that she is an adult making good money. Then, on Sunday, when the power was still off, she kind of went back to her childhood when she found an old thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle in the closet and spread it out on the family room floor. We all worked on it for a while before she got on the road to return to Cleveland. Then we went out to dinner with our son at a nearby Red Robin; he’s a big fan of their burgers.

The power was on again when we got back from dinner. Then we had the unwelcome task of throwing away whatever had spoiled in the freezer and refrigerator. But thankfully, it wasn’t all that much because I hadn’t bought a lot of groceries the past week, and many of the containers were almost empty.

My husband asked if we should throw away the condiments in the refrigerator door. My first thought was no, condiments don’t generally need a lot of refrigeration, but then I noticed that many of them were getting old anyway, or were mostly used up. So I pitched them all and cleaned out the plastic drawers. The refrigerator looks much neater and cleaner now, with that old stuff gone and fresh bottles of ketchup, etc.

So, I would say that the weekend turned out pretty good after all.