Just Another Day … Or is it?

It started as a pleasant morning, it was neither too hot nor cold. Towards mid-day however, the temperature rose to mid to high 30s (celsius). At this temperature our house would feel like a furnace. It is the middle of the school summer break in Australia and so the 2 girls – Celine and Jessica are at home. It was a lazy day for them and was spent watching TV while folding a few clothes.

By 4:30pm, a severe storm warning was raised. Almost at an instant the sky darkened and strong winds were blowing. At the office, someone e-mailed me the satelite photos and I saw that our suburb is right at the centre of the storm. Almost at the same time I got a call from Celine, her voice is excited as she described what was happening outside.

Australia is a very dry country – everybody knows that. We don’t experience storm or heavy rain very often, let alone hailstorm. When hailstorm occurs – it usually is isolated to a small area. The girls took a video of what was happening – pardon the cursing, just remember these girls don’t experience much weather disturbance. Blackout (power interuptions) is almost unheard of.

Luckily, there was no damage to our house or property. Last month, a hailstorm hit our neighboring suburb and there were lots of written off cars, damaged roofs and broken windows. You can still see a number of houses with tarps in their roofs even today.

When we came home, power was still out for most of our suburb and the storm had already passed. The radio said, over 20,000 homes are without power. So what do you actually do when there is no electricity? Well, we had a ‘Subway’ sandwich dinner – that went for about 15 minutes then what?

An amazing thing happened – we actually sat at the dinner table and talk. There were no TV to distract us, music, internet or any other form of electronic entertainment. You can’t even read a book – it was getting dark. When we got home, the girls had already managed to locate some candles – dinner candles that was never used last Christmas and some scented candles. They even located a box of matches.

After the short dinner, they cleared the table and brought out Cluedo. Can’t remember the last time I played Cluedo but it was fun and boring at the same time 🙂 We had 2 rounds of it, before we switch to playing Texas-Hold’em Poker. Jessica is a big fan of this variant of poker, so she taught us all the rules as we played. Celine was first to go, then Jeanne, then Jessica.

Power was still off – so we started to play, Pekwa a.k.a ‘Sulsuldong’, followed by Crazy-8 (while playing, I reminded them about their Lola Lou and how we loved to play card games with her – the girls said – “We know dad”, they too played cards with their Lola. Celine even kept the last deck of plastic playing cards of her Lola Lou). We then played several rounds of another variant of ‘Poker’ and also played ‘Good-Better-Best’ Poker.

At around 10:30pm, Celine decided to call Starbucks and asked if they were still open. They said they will close in half-an-hour. Without hesitation, we jumped into the car and headed to the nearest Starbucks. Just as we’re about to go out the door, power returned. The neighborhood had all their alarms blaring almost welcoming the return of civilization in our small village – actually, it’s just the suburbian way of reminding everyone to reset their alarms and go back to the TV, internet, XBOX, PS2 and all other form of electronic entertainment – that keeps us disconnected to the people nearest to us.

We decided to continue to head to Starbucks, anyway – luckily Celine knew the manager and they let us stay and have coffee in the shop a little longer as they cleaned and closed up for the day. We talked about how much fun we had tonight and all other topics – too controversial to be shared in a blog 😉 When we got home, we even tried to write this blog together. I can tell you now this is not the version we wrote 🙂 . You can however read Celine’s version of events in her blog called “The rains that bind us…”

Will we have a night like this again? Hmmm let me think … It takes great discipline to turn off the TV and the computer for a night and have a wonderful time with the family. It would probably take another storm – but this day is certainly ‘Not Just Another Day!’