Where else, but in Ocean Shores?

Where else, but in Ocean Shores, does a city voluntarily cut its citizens’ power off for 8 hours?  We got a notice two weeks ago that the city of Ocean Shores would cut off power today at 10 pm and that the entire city of Ocean Shores (population 5,622–hard to believe it is that high!) would be without power until tomorrow morning!

If someone dared do that in Seattle, the entire city would be up in arms.  I was at the IGA grocery store and talked to some people about the pending blackout.  One woman said, “Yeah, we’re just glad they told us, you know?  My mom’s on oxygen and I had to get her a few extra tanks to carry her over to the morning.”  My God!

I feel I am living in some post apocalyptic society where power has been lost.  It is now 9:45 p.m..  I have been baking and cooking all day and had to finish up before the end of the world hits! I have a retreat tomorrow, the Sicilian Heritage and Yoga Retreat.  A heap of work goes into Sicilian cooking and time is of essence here!  At any rate, I had to be done by 10 pm because, though my oven runs on propane, the lights will go out.  It is nearly impossible to cook in the dark.  I have prepared candles, they are already lit, and am glad I charged up my Ipad so I can read my Ibook.  Forget watching Netflix tonight.

Sometimes living out at Ocean Shores is like living at the edge of the world.  Tonight’s 8 hour electric cut off adds to that feeling.  No one I spoke to at the Ocean Shores IGA thought it was strange that the city mandated this power shutdown. And to think I used to fret with worry for my parents, who were both dependent on oxygen machines at the late stages of their lives, anytime a Midwest storm hit, afraid they would lose power and that Nora, who lived 20 minutes away, would not be able to help them!

I have all the candles lit.  10 pm just hit and we still have power. Weird.  Maybe the apocalypse isn’t going to happen?

Meanwhile, my fridge only has so much space, so I filled two coolers with ice and put some things that could use coolness, but not necessarily need the low temps of refrigeration, into the coolers and set them out on the deck.  But, this is Ocean Shores!  What was I thinking?  Four raccoons appeared immediately to check out the coolers.  The raccoons sure are adorable, if not a royal pain and problematic!  The only thing that scared them off was Rick’s violin stick tapping on the window.  But they will be back, for sure.  They know some goodies are in the cooler, so Rick will now place the coolers in the crawl space where the contents will be safe from marauders.

10:15 pm.  Plunged into darkness.  The whole peninsula.  I just heard Rick say, “Oh, cool!  This is so great!…

After Rick’s eyes adjust to the darkness, he adds, “Hey, Frannie, why is there still light in your room?”

“Because I lit some candles.”

How can Rick think this is cool??  Even when I was in the most remote villages in Senegal, there was some power coming off generators.  Not having power is fine when you are camping, but in your own home…when there isn’t even a tumultuous storm to explain the outage?  And now I don’t have WiFi and cannot send this blog off until tomorrow morning, when we will once again wake up to the modern world.

I see this blog is a rant.

OK, so I leave you with a photo of one of our four raccoon visitors looking in on us from the deck.  It was dark outside, but we still had power so the interior of the house was lit up.  This made for an optical illusion!  It looks like the raccoon is INSIDE the house looking out at us, wondering what we two humans are doing out on the deck and he is probably already figuring out how to hide his stash of food.

Raccoon Marauder