So after a productive day on Friday, I settled in with my cozy afghan and my pets to watch The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Sigh. I just LOVE the little girl who plays Lucy. Can I adopt her? She is not only perfect in that role she is just so adorable. Anyway, just as things were getting good and Edmund munched on turkish delight, the lights flared, dimmed, flared, and then the electricity went out. Not to worry. These things happen in the country. After waiting half an hour, I called Dominion power, only to hear the news that they didn’t expect the power back on until 10:30. Not to worry, the family channel was showing the movie again at 9:30 pm, so if the lights came back on at 10:30 I’d be nearly at the same spot in the movie where I left off….no lights at 10:30. I stumbled into bed by the light of a flashlight, and awoke at 4 am when the electricity finally came back on. Brrr! Chilly night too, but thankfully the house temperature didn’t dip below 60. I’m always so curious as to what causes these random power outages in the countryside, but I may never know.
It’s always a reminder when the electricity goes out to be thankful for electricity! We put candles around the Nativity set on the TV stand and they lit the living room nicely, but it was too dark really to read. John and I told each other stories from when we were little. I never knew his neighbor and our good friend, Gus Bartik, had a peacock! This was a suburban Long Island community. John told me Gus raised ducks in his little yard and he had a peacock. He said the peacock used to fly up onto all the neighbor’s roofs and caw or whatever it is they do. I couldn’t stop laughing. What a funny picture! I told him how I had bit into a wax pear in a bowl of fake fruit in my grandmother’s house – I wasn’t fooled by the fruit, I was just fooling around, and boy was I punished for that. Then I told him about the pictures she had in her kitchen. She liked those harlequin type clowns. They scared me.
I reminisced about my Uncle Arthur and Aunt Janice and my cousins, visiting with them in their house in Bowie, Maryland, about their dog Jackie who used to tinkle at the first sight of a guest and about how kind my cousin Andrew was to me, taking me out into the yard and playing ball to keep me from being bored, and how Cathy showed me her Barbie dolls even though she was a teenager and probably bored stiff.
Later we went outside to see if we could spot the promised meteor shower, but no luck. I did see some sort of large animal slinking through the orchard by the light of the full moon. From our upstairs bathroom window you have an amazing view of nearly half the yard. Although the moonlight was bright, I couldn’t tell what kind of animal it was. By the size and how it moved I think it was the coyote back for a visit!
