power

At 8am this morning the power went off for the day - planned maintenance work was required to the major powerline so the whole area was blacked out (if you can call it a blackout in glorious sunshine!)

The first thing that hit me was how quiet the house suddenly was, no water pump, no fridge humming, no computer fans whirring - all the background noises that are so constant you stop noticing them until they aren't there any more.

Apart from the sudden realisation at 8.05am that I'd not made my toast (but I still got my porridge, thank heavens for gas hobs!) I didn't really find myself that inconvenienced but it did make me realise just how reliant upon electricity we are. It's amazing how many things require it, especially when your water supply is pumped to the house by an electric pump! We could have sat in the car to listen to the radio, or used my dinky radio with earphones (which I only remembered about afterwards) but as Elizabeth had caught enough of the news headlines to hear that John Howard was no the longer Aussie PM (yay!!!) we just cheerfully waited to hear more later.

Later... not just the radio news & the tv news but the washing machine, dishwasher, checking emails, showers, lights, the toilet cisterns refilling instead of using buckets, filling the jug (kettle) from the tap and boiling it, baking potatoes in the oven, the fridge getting back to temperature and the light going on again when the door opened...

Between us we gardened, knitted, sewed, read, made coffee on the stove and boiled water in a pan for tea, we went for a windswept walk/run on the beach and then gradually de-sanded ourselves across the floors and furniture as no matter how hard you try to brush it off it is never quite enough. It wasn't that different from any other Sunday really, we wondered though just how different other people's days might have been from the norm, and maybe it was a good thing to have had no power if it meant children played outside more and people appreciated more what a luxury having electricity on demand is and what alternatives we need in place to get by without it.