Sometimes, when you decide to rough it, life throws you an extra curve ball.

I went camping this weekend for the first time since grade seven. (No, I don’t want to tell you how long ago that was.) It was quite enjoyable – we got there early, set things up, had a lovely quiet afternoon, had a communal dinner with others who arrived later, did the campfire thing, slept well, ate a couple more meals, packed up, left. Glorious weather. Lovely silence. Much green. Few bugs. I must make the observation that a disproportionate amount of time is spent preparing food or eating, which leads me to believe that camp food should actually be more of a gourmet experience than it usually is. I mean, heck, if you’re going to spend that much time creating a meal, you might as well Create a Meal, right? I spent more time thinking about/working with food in a day than I usually do in a week. Next time, the husband and I will design ourselves a real menu, and gourmandise to our hearts’ content.

We came home and went to a late afternoon birthday party for a very young lady, which was lovely – we saw all sorts of people we hadn’t seen in a while. As an added bonus, we had front row seats to an exquisite electrical storm accompanied by waves of pounding rain and a terrific wind. We stood on the back porch with other storm lovers and revelled in the thunder and lightning (which hit the train tracks a hundred feet south of us) until it finally became just rain. We left not long after that, around seven-ish. I’m not sure what time we got home, because the entire neighbourhood had lost power at six-fifteen, according to the clock on my stove. That lovely storm we’d watched had knocked out a lot of the island’s electricity, and – worse – had torn up our beautiful park with its mature trees. We walked through the park to check the damage before we even went into our apartment; the trees have been snapped in half or by a third, the branches lying strewn on the wet grass like the fallen after a battle. The trees were mostly all right; some had snapped due to the beginnings of rot, but others were in shock from having perfectly healthy limbs torn from them and flung thirty to fifty feet away. I comforted them as best I could because it just didn’t seem right to walk away from them again after stepping over their branches and pushing past wet leaves. Yes, I hugged them, and stroked them, and told them it would be all right; I’m not kidding when I said they were in shock. I felt what I felt. An extremely violent sudden gust must have raged through the area – that’s the only reason we can think of for the trees snapping like that, for snap they did, all in the same direction with similar breaks; it wasn’t from a constant bending or weakening, and they certainly weren’t all dozen or so struck by lightning.

We came home and lit candles in the darker parts of the flat and ate the extra-creamy chocolate ice cream that was rapidly losing the “ice” part of its definition, which was fun. When we went to sleep we were confident that the power would be back in the morning; in fact, we were slightly surprised that five hours later, it hadn’t been restored. We put it down to reduced crews working on the Sunday eve of a civic holiday and blew out our candles.

Well, naturally it wasn’t back in the morning. We bought ice (which was in short supply) and used the cooler we’d taken camping with us to pack our frozen (thawing) meat and such. My husband grumbled. I said, “Yes, but we had a lovely visit last night, and a wonderful camping trip!” to which he replied, “Yeah, well, still feels like we’re camping somehow.” Our kitchen is equipped with a gas stove, so we could still boil water for tea and soup and such; and the husband went out to the car and brought in the coffee percolator we’d used on the Hibachi over the weekend, which worked just as well on our gas elements. He went off to work fortified with percolated coffee, and I spent the day reading and napping on the living room floor. Oh yes – I cleaned out the fridge too. Funny; I so often don’t have the radio or a CD on when I have the option, but yesterday the knowledge that I couldn’t turn music on nagged me no end, all day.

We’d planned to do laundry, but with no hot water or power we ended up travelling to my in-laws’ place on the South Shore (how ironic is that, after the ice storm?) so showers and clean clothes could be had. They had just returned from a weekend of camping themselves, but were happy to see us, and we had a relaxing casual dinner. When we left our apartment, we’d been without electricity for twenty-four hours. It amuses me to some extent; for six years I lived near the airport, and my power never went down – even during the ice storm I only lost it for a couple of hours or so. I’m not much for the constant use of electrical devices – I don’t watch TV very often, I don’t play computer games, I use candles a lot anyway, etcetera – but I missed hot water, and the loss of most of my frozen food irritated me. Bits of the neighbourhood were restored at various times of the day – the south side of our street had power early yesterday, for example; however, the poor depanneur next to us on our side of the street spent the day emptying his freezers and setting his shelves out against the building walls to dry off. Coming home late last night we thought the whole neigbourhood was back… until we turned onto our cross street and nearly had a fit to see that the street on our block was dark. Fortunately, we’re on a corner, and our building is apparently wired into the main street, not the cross street; our power had been restored nine minutes before we came home, according to all our flashing digital clocks. (Note to self: find a nice old-fashioned wind-up analog clock.)

It’s odd to notice that your mind automatically begins making plans. What do I have in the pantry, what do I need, is the grocery store out of electricity as well, what should I stock up on, who else might need help, etcetera, etcetera. I was thankful to have gas, so I could still have tea (while there’s tea there’s hope!), and overall it wasn’t a huge personal inconvenience. It just served to remind me how thankful I should be for the tiny miracles that we don’t notice – like flipping the light switch in the front entryway, or washing your hands in hot water. And laundry.

I have an osteopath appointment this morning, then it’s off to work. The official countdown begins: including today, four days to go.