I had a mouthful of toothpaste last night when everything suddenly went very dark.

Spit.

So did that mean that when the Flex Alert said to wait till after 9:00 pm to do your laundry everybody started theirs at the same time? Along with turning on the dishwasher for the night? (Guilty.)

Earthquake readiness says we’re supposed to have flashlights by our sides of the bed. He found his. Mine was AWOL. Of all the things not to be prepared about after all the warnings re the power and the heat, I was apologizing to him that I… Oh there it is. I gave him his back.

He called to report the outage and it turned out no one else in our neighborhood had. What? They were saying 12,000 out, not quite reaching to our street (but it did.) Was everybody else in bed at 10:30? Seems like it.

We read to each other, like we do every night, and doing it by flashlight was kind of fun, like when you read under the covers as a kid and tried not to get caught not going to sleep.

Then we tried to turn off the lights in the dark.

But you know those dimming/brightening switches with the flat rectangular panel rather than a small black piece sticking out? How do you turn one of those off when the power’s out? I asked him. So it doesn’t flip all the lights back on in our faces in the middle of the night?

He confessed he did not know, which sounded to me like, Face it, honey, we’re hosed.

And yet. Turns out the bedroom lights were the ones that didn’t. It was the ones in the closet and the hallway, the ones with the flip-it switches that I’d missed because I hadn’t known which ones to turn off, and, well, we know who the light sleeper is who took care of that.

Let’s not do that again. Which is why breakfast and dinner were both baked at 7:30 this morning, side by side, 25 minutes and off fast, just in time for the dentist to call and ask me, Could you come in a few hours early this morning?

I am writing this several hours earlier than my usual. I’m trying to beat the next outage. And probably so was the dentist.

Oh, and one other thing to add: Happy Birthday to my late Grandmother J and Happy 100th Anniversary to my Grandparents B.