Earlier this evening we had the misfortune of being without power. This predicament is fairly common in our area thanks to a few irresponsible homeowners who live down the road. It seems they allow their trees to become severely overgrown with vines and these vines then attach themselves to the power lines.

Now, I am no electrician… the electrician in the family is my brother, William. However, I am thinking that these overgrown vines must put some kind of strain on the power lines because every time the vines become out of control it blows a fuse in the street transformer!

This tends to happen about twice a year! The funny part of it is that when this fuse blows it is extremely loud and my poor pups make a mad dash for the nearest lap. The time before last my poor Boxer, Asia Marie, had just squatted down to do her business when it blew… I’m sure you can picture her reaction!

I was taking a little afternoon nap when I was suddenly awoken by the loud boom. That undeniable sound that we all dread to hear. It’s not that we are so urban that we just can’t live without electricity… it’s just that we live in the infamously humid Houston, Texas and summer is here! Yea, you know what that means… 90 degrees is a cool front!

After reporting the outage to the electric company we were informed that they would be out to restore our power by 9:30PM!

It was 4:30PM when the power went out!

We were not too thrilled.

Power outages can be detrimental to us freelancers who work from home! It’s not like I have a generator at my disposal after all.

Since nightfall was upon us I brought out my antique oil lamps so that we wouldn’t be sitting around in the dark. My brother always made fun of me for loving antiques and collecting all this “old useless junk” until tonight when he realized this “old junk” wasn’t so useless after all.

To pass time I started text messaging Trey on my T-Mobile Dash.

After a few exchanged messages between Trey and myself I had to stop and laugh at the irony.

Here I was text messaging on my very high tech phone by light from an antique oil lamp.

How often do we get to bridge the gap between old and new in such a manner?

This lamp is from circa 1890 and my phone is from 2008!

While I enjoyed the nostalgic experience it makes one wonder how anyone got much work done yesteryear without electric lights. Sure the lamps put out great light, unfortunately they also put out a great deal of heat.

The experience definitely makes you learn not to take for granted our creature comforts we have become accustomed to over the decades.