Who Needs Electricity? Wait... I do!

So, do to a recent hurricane in Texas many of the Duke Energy employees who serve us so well here in Cincinnati went to help turn power back on in the South. Little did anyone know that around 4:00pm Sunday afternoon a freak windstorm would blow through the tri-state knocking down trees, and cutting power to more than a million customers from Dayton, Ohio, to Lawrenceburg, Indiana to Florence, Kentucky. It goes without saying that we were all very surprised and very underprepared. Calling in reinforcements from S. Carolina has not been quite enough because half of our Duke staff is still in Texas, but we are getting by nonetheless.

There are many good reason for electricity; hot food, cold food, television, radio, lighting, computer use, charging a cell phone, but we had to learn over the past 4 days how to survive without all of these wonderful things. So, in the midst of no power and no entertainment, I have decided to give my list of the very few reasons why I love living without electricity.

1. There are oh-so-many good books to read out there and I finally had an excuse to get some summer reading in just before school starts next week.

2. Playing board games is a lot of fun by candlelight.

3. Peanut Butter and Jelly tastes delicious when there is no other food left in the house.

4. It's amazing how much cleaning you can do when you don't have television to compromise your time.

5. It truly is nice to go to bed before 10:00pm because you have run out of things to do.

For anyone interested, Michael and I are still without power but this only means that we'll be eating our chunky peanut butter and grape jam sandwiches to candlelight tonight as I challenge him to a rematch of scrabble.