The Best Laid Plans, Acts of God and the Electric Company

Sometimes I wonder if we're supposed to try to plan things.  It seems, on occasion at least, as if the universe is trying to tell me it's folly to believe that I can develop a list of things I intend to accomplish and proceed to tackle them.  

Like tonight.  I arrived home after a "day that was filled with surprises."  (A little ditty which I just learned has been stuck inside my head for several decades courtesy of the Mickey Mouse Club--strangely enough, since the only time I could see that classic show growing up was when I visited my out-of-state Grandma.)  My husband and I had gone out for a Happy Hour supper, and made several stops on the way home.  We were searching for a rear wiper blade for our 1996 Isuzu, only to be told, by the forthright employee of the last auto parts store we visited, that Isuzu is not "third-party-friendly."  Meaning they don't share parts information with the makers of accessories like wiper blades.  So my son will leave town tomorrow morning on his first long-distance road trip sans rear wiper blade. 

We also stopped at the public library so that I could view the website I'd set up for a client on Internet Explorer, the browser he uses which is no longer supported by Mac, which I use. 

When we returned home, we walked into a totally darkened house, on a totally darkened block, and heard, but did not see, our two sons somewhere in the cave of our living room, announcing a power failure that had begun some three minutes before we arrived.

Instead of starting the blog post I had planned to write this evening, I spent the next forty-five minutes scrambling for candles and flashlights.  Apparently,  I am out of practice in dealing with power outages.  I found myself using the candle I finally located that had enough of a wick to support a flame, which I had ignited after braille-ing my way through the kitchen in search of a candle lighter, to grope my way toward the light switch upon entering each new room.  As if the only problem was that I couldn't see the light switch!  

Then I returned a call I'd missed from my daughter, and she advised me to call the power company, her former employer, in case they didn't know about the outage.  I figured that, since my computer still had some juice, I could use it to look up the number.  Forgetting, of course, that I would need an internet connection, which was not possible with no power to the modem or the router.  My clever daughter looked up the number in her phone book, in her house five blocks away where they had power.  I typed it into my computer, which was at least good for note-taking, hung up, and then called the power company number. 

As I was "press[ing] 1 to report a power outage," the lights went back on.  (Clearly, I should have called earlier!)  After I hung up, the power company called me (a robo call, of course) to see if I had experienced a power outage!  I pressed whatever number corresponded to "I sure as hell did!" and hung up.  They called again--a different robot this time--to let me know that I had experienced a power outage, which they had subsequently fixed, and that I was one of 1,942 homes affected.

If I was planning to blog about something more meaningful tonight, I no longer remember what it was.