We had a surprise yesterday, an unexpected one. Not the rain; it's spring, after all, and even if it was heavy at times ... well, the painters didn't stop painting, which actually did rate as a bit of a surprise. And it even thunderstormed a bit. But the surprise came when the power flicked off, and, worse, didn't come back. I was fine just reading by myself for a while, as 
bunny_hugger was coming home from work, but she had her long day at work and then long drive through the rain and really wanted a nice warm dinner and, well, electric stove.
She did ask why I wasn't using the flashlight instead of these little portable spot lights that I wanted in case of power failures and I couldn't give any reason why not. She also thought of a battery-operated lantern she had in the attic for this sort of need, but, the batteries were dead, as by law they must be. Finally we thought to build a fire, the first one we've made in really too long, and that provided us with a pleasant light and even better heat, since the house was not getting cold but was dropping in temperature just enough to notice.
So we spent hours sitting around the living room, bunny_hugger thinking of how this was like camping, me massaging first her back and then her feet, and we shared reminiscences of, particularly, when we went off to grad school, and thoughts about what fractions of our lives had been spent in various states, most precious of them what fraction of our lives have been spent in a serious relationship with one another. When the lights did come back it was almost disappointing, as the flickering part-visible living room collapsed into a simple and well-lit, well-defined standard.
Our rabbit --- who'd spent pretty much the entire day inside his cage --- finally came out at night, possibly to see bunny_hugger, possibly to figure out why there weren't any lights on or why the whole room was lit by firelight.
Trivia: To prove that the proposed Skylab astronaut diet of 2,000 calories per day plus up to 800 additional ``snack'' calories was inadequate to the projected workload, astronaut Bill Thornton, a 207-pound man with under ten percent body fat, lived on it (with exercise to approximate the workload) for thirty days. He lost 28 pounds, most of it upper-body muscle. The experiment did not convince all the medical investigators. Source: Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story, David Hitt, Owen Garriott, Jew Kerwin.
Currently Reading: India: A History, John Keay.
