Saturday, September 4, 2010

Some perspective for tea.

The power went out lat night for an hour and a half. I faffed about for 10 minutes in the twilight gloom looking for matches to go with the candles we bought after the last blackout, before I managed to locate a lighter in the desk drawer. Then I had my three candles on the mantle-piece, amongst my pot plants, lighting up the living room.
Then I went online, onto Facebook, with my mobile phone and had a bit of a tongue-in-cheek bitch about the power going out, and being reduced to eating broken crackers and pate for dinner.
Then I realised, that TIC or not, that had been an incredibly dumb thing to say. What was I thinking? In the same day that there is a 7.1 earthquake in Christchurch, and the day after Pakistan experiences it's latest bombings in amongst the floods (and the cricket scandal, let's not forget!), and I manage to be online, on my fancy mobile phone, in the middle of a blackout, eating my crackers that I found in the darkened cupboards in my kitchen, with the vegemite, and the jam, and above my flours and sugars and cocoa, with pate that I found in my fridge with the milk and the butter and the cheese and the eggs and the fresh vegetables and stock-in-a-carton and yogurt and tamarind paste and curry paste and tomato paste ...
Mmmm.
I had food, and more than enough of it. I still had hot water in the tank. I had candles, and a lighter, and a torch, and a phone. The house wasn't particularly cold. SP was safe and warm and fed, asleep in her bassinet on top of her sheepskin and rugged up in her wraps.
A blackout for a few hours is perhaps not such a big deal, after all.

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