Lights Out

When we were reading On the Banks of Plum Creek several days ago, Blaze had asked what a slate was, so the last time I was at the craft store I bought one. Yesterday was our first time using it for math and it worked our really well. The novelty value had a lot to do with that, but it also made it easier for Blaze to do subtraction by making tiny dots with the chalk to represent the original number and then using his finger to erase the number of dots being taken away.



Last night we had an unintentional lesson in what it would be like to live in pioneer days. Our power went out.
DH and I had gone out to the grocery store, and to buy fast food for last night's dinner (because it was around 7:30 by the time we were headed home from the store). Since we hadn't bought anything that needed to go into the freezer, we decided to eat dinner first before unloading the car.
When we set our bags from the hamburger place down, we noticed what they said and had to take this picture:



As soon as I finished eating, I headed out to get some of the grocery bags from the car, but I had only gone halfway to the parking lot when all the lights went out. We live in a fairly large apartment complex with a well lit parking area and a lit basketball court and volleyball court, so no lights at all was pretty dramatic.
We were without electricity for for about an hour and a half. DH, Blaze, and I went out walking around to see what was going on and we stopped for a few minutes to admire the stars, which were so much brighter without the street lights. We passed a couple men talking about what stars they had been able to see before the power outage and how clear others were now.
An alarm was going off at the office/laundry room building, but nothing seemed to be really wrong, so we turned around and headed home, but that was when the sirens started. Police cars and three fire trucks descended on the University Family Housing Complex. The alarm must have called them, but they drove around in a really confused way, with sirens blazing and lights flashing. Two of the fire trucks and an emergency van ended up at the office, so we walked back up there to see what was going on.



There were a lot of people milling about by that time, but nobody knew what was going on.
We finally came home, got Blaze ready for bed and I started reading him his bedtime story by candlelight and flashlight, when the power came back on.
The electricity went out again for a short time while I was getting ready for bed, but it's working fine now and we still have no idea what caused it to go out in the first place.