Losing Power

Sometimes, I forget how dependent we are on electricity. But then HKB"H does something to click on the proverbial lightbulb, in this case, a purely metaphorical one. At about 2:39 today, our power went out. At first we thought it was a blown fuse, but quickly discovered it wasn't. Then we headed outside to find something out of a movie - one by one the neighbors emerging to investigate. Despite our suspicions, the outage was not caused by the construction vehicle working down the block. It bacame apparent that the entire yishuv had lost power. Then we found out that Modiin was also in the dark. Knowing that the blackout was widespread and not just our house, street, or yishuv, was oddly comforting. In any case, I was unable to bake - fortunately, the actual cookies were done, and I had only to bake the two types of bars I was making. My laptop was fully charged, so I used the opportunity to address my stack of invitations to the shul dinner. I raced through as quickly as possible, and it went well. I labeled, David and the kids stuffed and sealed, and then the kids sorted by street. But beyond that, the kids were bored; my efforts to convince them that there is lots to do when the power is out fell on deaf ears. "Did the frontier kids complain that they had no electricity and didn't have TV?" "Imma, they didn't know that they were missing, so it didn't matter, but we know!" Ahh, the power of logic. It slowly got darker and darker - for a good chunk of time, it was lighter outdoors than in, even as the sun was setting. At shul, mincha and maariv were davened outside. Finally, after a couple of false starts, the power was restored at around 5:45, and life could go on.

One bit of irony: we forgot to do the one thing we could have accomplished easily without power - have Ariella do her homework! No one thought of it until about 6, shortly after the power had returned, while we were giving the kids dinner, and just before we were supposed to leave for Part 1 of the weekend's B'nei Akiva festivities.

As I have mentioned before, Chodesh Irgun involves a performance by the various shvatim. This year, the performances were split over two nights, Thursday and Saturday, as to lessen the torment, I mean the lateness of the night. Dani and Ayelet's groups both performed admirably. There are no pictures because both dances were mostly in the dark: Dani's with a strobe, and Ayelet's with a black light. We are very proud of all their hard work. A couple of other groups were great, too. The 8th grade boys did a dance with garbage cans - including boys in the cans being wheeled around - and the 5th grade girls did a wedding themed dance. Their costumes were wedding gowns made of white sweatshirts atop a skirt made of paper tablecloth, puffed out by a crinoline made of white supermarket bags. Ingenious and adorable! And the whole evening was over at 8:15! It was a miracle. Of course, none of the big three had school the next day, so that was some serious bitul Torah. Oh well. The rest of the night was spent trying to make up for the hours of work I lost. In any case, the blackout was memorable.

Hoping to keep the lights on,
Dvora