Losing power certainly brings home just how reliant we are on electricity. Can't see once the sun goes down, can't watch anything on TV, no music, no air conditioning, no computer, not even cooking. Even my garage door is electric, so getting in the car to go anywhere else isn't easy. (You can raise it manually but then you have to reset the opener, which is a royal pain.) Worst would be losing refrigeration and spoiling food, but the outage would have to be longer for that to be a real issue.
Having said that, I still managed to spend the outage time on an electronic device. My tablet does just fine for a couple of hours of comic-book reading on battery power. Good thing, since it was too dark to read anything without back-lighting. Saved me from having to pull out the candles.
My power company sent me an email about the outage, which is a nice bit of customer service that I don't remember seeing before. It had a time estimate for restoration, which they actually beat by about an hour. It also included the cause: "Car/Pole accident." Sounds unfortunate for the car and driver, wherever it happened.
This outage didn't last long, fortunately. Great response by the power company folks, taking care of the problem quickly. But it does make you appreciate having constant, steady electricity the majority of the time!
