It's been "interesting times" in the Chinese sense since midnight last night. All I can say is that Pidgie's birthday has started on a lively note.

We left the attic fan on last night in a last-ditch effort not to have to start the A/C. It was still so warm we were both reading until almost midnight, but when the lights were off I, at least, dropped off quickly.

A little after one there was a flash, a roar like artillery...and the power went out. There was a resounding crash of silence after the shutters on the attic fan clapped shut.

I went running out of the room with a flashlight moments later, as both James and I had smelled something burnt immediately after the crash. However, the scent dissipated quickly and the house seemed okay. But down in the den, since we can't keep the window open, it was as breathless as a newly-opened pyramid. I couldn't leave Pidge down there with no air, so I brought his cage up to the spare room and fumbled for a few moments with a large-enough small table to put it on. He clung to his swing the entire time, with a big-eyed look that convinced me he thought he was having a bad dream.

I let Wil run upstairs while I did that, but as the thunder disappeared as fast as it had arrived, she was sent back downstairs to her bed.

Then I tried to get back to sleep, but for a while that was impossible. James has to sleep with a C-PAP to breathe at night, so he was wandering about like Hamlet's father's ghost. I did get him to lie down once, he did fall asleep (I could tell; he snored) but jumped up and said "I can't sleep!" and went peripatetic again.

He did call the power company and got through because this was a very localized outage: we could look across the back fence and see that the apartment complex still had lights, and if I looked out the front window, you could see the streetlight from down near the condos, but our street and the one behind it were velvet black in complete silence.

I apparently dozed occasionally until the power came back on at 4:12; I reset the alarm and both of us fell promptly to sleep. When the alarm buzzed at six I knew I couldn't drive with three hours sleep so I reset it for seven. My head hit the pillow again and next thing I knew the damn alarm was going off again. ::groan::

So Pidgie's back downstairs, James is off to his first day of work since April–14, and we're all blinking like stock owls in a haunted house feature. Pidge and Willow can at least go back to sleep!

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 9:01:00 AM

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